Support for FLORIS v2

[rafmudaf]

From December 2021 through March 2022, the a team of FLORIS developers at NREL worked to redesign the architecture of the software considering many lessons learned from the prior five years of work on the FLORIS software. The size and scope of wind farm controls research had changed in that time, as well, and we needed to support a larger computational load without incurring a limiting computational cost. The redesigned architecture, FLORIS v3, has been available since March 1, 2022, and new features and improvements are regularly released with v3.5 on the schedule for release soon. That being said, there is not yet feature parity between v2 and v3, and some of the missing features are due to time constraints while others are intentionally left out. Two project boards were used actively during the v3 development process: we started with https://github.com/rafmudaf/floris/projects/1 and then migrated to https://github.com/orgs/NREL/projects/18/views/7. Anyone interested in following the development timeline could start there to follow considerations on where and how we chose to focus time in the new architecture.

Given the current state of FLORIS and limited resources for software development within the NREL team, we cannot commit to supporting any bugs or feature requests in versions less than 3. We are happy for users of those versions to open new issues, discussions, and pull requests. When reasonable, we'll provide input, review new code, and support merging and bug-fix releases. Generally, it is very helpful to open a new Discussion detailing a missing feature in FLORIS. This is the best way to aggregate information on the idea and engage other members of the community to participate, as well. Thumbs-up's 👍 on the key post in the Discussion are a great way to show support, and everyone should feel comfortable liberally giving them.