With the release of YaBB 2.2, and my reinvigoration toward hobby coding, I am curious:
What features would you like to see in a forum?
If you were to install a discussion forum on your own Web site, what features would you want the software to have?
If you were to visit a site that has a forum, what features would you want at your fingertips as a regular user?
What are your thoughts on the matter?
As promised in the last installment, here is an update on what I’ve been doing over the last few weekends.
Two weekends ago, I spent almost the entire weekend coding the CMS that I’ve been very slowly chipping away at for the last year or so. I actually got a great deal of coding done. I applied my newfound knowledge of PHP object-oriented programming (OOP) to create a “user” class rather than trying to fiddle around with a lot of arrays and cookies and stuff.
If I can get two or three more weekends to do that much programming, I should be able to put together an actual release of my CMS and start using it on some production sites.
Then, last weekend, I spent all weekend upgrading the forums on my Web site. As mentioned in an earlier post, YaBB 2.2 has been released. Because we have had some issues with our Web host, I had previously moved our forums from one server to another. I figured that it made sense to move our forums back to their original location while I was upgrading to Y2.2. Unfortunately, though, the combination of my slow connection and the overwhelming number of files made for a very long weekend of sitting around and watching files download and upload to and from my various servers.
Anyway, that’s about all I spent my time on over the last few weekends. Hopefully I’ll have more good news updates in the near future.
For anyone who does read the HTMLCenter blog regularly, I must apologize for slacking a little bit lately. Up until a few weeks ago, I had been trying to release a new post every other day. However, recently I’ve been elbow-deep in programming, and haven’t had much energy to make blog posts, resulting in some posts being spaced out three days or more apart from each other. Here’s an update on what I’ve been doing.
First of all, we’ve had a lot of stuff going on at work. I’ve been in meetings pretty much all day each day for the last three or four business days. I attended a conference and worked on a few new initiatives with varied groups of people. I also had to make a presentation at each of our campuses over the last few days.
YaBB, an extremely popular and secure forum software, written entirely in Perl, released a new version on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007. Exactly two years after YaBB 2.1 was released, YaBB 2.2 has come on full-force.
From the official announcement on the YaBB Support Forums:
YaBB 2.2 – small numbers don’t mean small changes
Below is a list of just some of the things changed for this release. The list will be updated over the next few days. There are so many improvements, it’s a project just to list them all!
Feature Additions:
——————————–
Allow members to choose non-administration membergroups in their profile
Private Messages Buddy List
Buddy list integration in view profile and topic displays
Added a:visited CSS style and various other missing or previously hardcoded styles
Carbon and Blind-Carbon Copy address boxes in Private Messages
User Panel – buddy list, private messaging center, profile, etc.
Admin option for who can see the members list
Private Message ignore list
Forward Private Messages
The full list of feature additions, security fixes, bug fixes, etc. is available in the official announcement.
My supervisor at work sent me a link to the following video the other day. It starts off kind of boring, and it’s a bit long, but it does get much better as the video goes on. It’s a great video for graphic designers. Enjoy!
Well, it’s halftime of the “biggest regular season game in history”. Unless the Patriots come out of the locker room in the second half as a completely different team, I don’t see things going their way tonight. They have been playing poorly, given up a huge interception and been penalized for over 100 yards in the first half. In the last 30 seconds of the first half, they gave up a huge play, allowing the Colts to score a touchdown and take the lead.
This is just a quick post to say that I went to a pretty good conference today. I am rarely able to find conferences that are worthwhile for me, but today I happened upon one.
Generally, being that I am a Web developer, I find that conferences are skewed away from my particular interests. For example, I was looking at a conference that is supposed to occur this month. The conference itself is a 5-day event in Nashville with over 100 different sessions.
Unfortunately, however, all but one session is skewed toward either IT professionals or faculty. Only one single session is geared toward Web developers. It’s hardly worth the extravagant cost of admission to go to a conference like that.
As I said, I am a Web developer. I am not an IT professional, nor am I really a marketing professional. Unfortunately, though, 99% of the “Web conferences” I have looked at are geared toward one of those types of people. Very few are geared towards those of us working on developing the Web sites.
Today, though, I was able to network with some good individuals and was able to participate in a roundtable discussion about dealing with Web 2.0 interfaces like MySpace, Facebook and SecondLife.
Happy Halloween everybody!
This is just a really quick post to wish everybody that celebrates this holiday a happy one. I hope you all got lots of candy and carved some great pumpkins.
Did you miss me? Sorry I didn’t get a blog post put out last night. I was without my computer for the whole day, due to the fact that I am working on fixing my mother-in-law’s computer. She basically inherited her son’s old Pavilion desktop, and it is chock full of all sorts of performance-degrading software.
Of course, before I wipe the whole thing, she wanted me to back up all of his old stuff, in case he ever needs it. I had no idea what I was getting into when I agreed to work on it.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of trying to figure out how to rip the audio soundtrack off of a DVD. To say the least, it was an extremely painful process. The end lesson for me was that there is no easy way to rip the soundtrack from a DVD.
I’m certain that there are tools out there to make this easier, but with the short amount of time I had to complete the project, I wasn’t able to find one.
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