I strongly agree with DMOL on the topic of being able to combine our membership registration with message board registration. Right now I have 52K members on my email list but have only gotten 17K of them to register to use the boards. And it causes constant confusion when they sign up for one but really wanted the other. It's a daily thing I have to deal with and no matter how much I explain it to new members/users it still causes confusion. I want our members to go 1 place to both join our organization and get on our email list AND become registered to post on the message boards.

And my vote (though it''s already too late) would have been for the UI first. Why duplicate work?

Brian

So this was almost a month ago, on 11.21. When can we expect the blog at least in beta? when in production? Would be a nice Christmas present!

Did you ever specify what the ubb-blog software is supposed to do? A spec list of the blog features? Please do so or refer us to the appropriate spec list.


What I would want and expect is that I myself as the main poster can have blog pages, where my contribution is in larger, more prominent fonts then the replies, or other people's remarks. Or, I wonder, maybe that can already be done somehow, by having the first post in a thread automatically in bigger fonts, or by having admin posts be in bigger fonts, and by restricting maximum font size by other posters. If it can be done somehow, please someone enlighten me how to do that.


Oh yes, it is too late already, but my vote is for blog!


And, off topic, Rick, you might pursue this:
123flashchat.com, a commercial chat provider with flash and ajax chat clients made a very nice chat integration for me, with database integration, neat security features, etc. I pestered them until they nicely integrated features like

• admin rights: board admins become chat admins
• banned members are banned in chat too
• visible differentiation of registered members vs unregistered guests

Well, from what Rick said previously is that the blogs will pretty much be a extension of the users profile.

My translation to this is he is going to add back in the ability to have a photo in the user bio, UBB.Classic feature killed in UBB.Threds but asked for many times, and make a new field allowing for a brief comment from the user.

Anyway that was my translation to it all.

This is not really a blog but hey, Rick stated many times he is ONLY interested in "message boards" and not community software for other uses, or pretty much but not those exact words.

Since the poll is about 50-50%, why don't they implement both at the same time . Never heard of multi-tasking or making a good design beforehand ?

Nope. Never had hear of that there type thing.

Features will probably be an updated profile page including a UBB buddy list, visitor comments to the profile itself, and blogs. List of recent blogs on the main profile page, linking to the full blog post with user comments beneath. Some type of user control for the profile owner to edit/delete comments, with the forum admin being able to do so as well.

As for not working on both at the same time. Couple reasons for this. As mentioned we've been promising blogs for a long time now. At this point I'm not sure if we'll be doing the UI update in one swoop. We may be splitting it into a Control Panel update first and then the front end second. If that were the case it would be 2 versions until blogs would get put in.

It's not totally doubling the work. The database work and interaction between scripts and DB won't have to be redone, just the design. When we do the UI update you can expect the blog to expand in features a bit. Probably giving the owner the option to what columns are displayed on the right/left side, etc.

Perhaps when you do the "UI" stuff you can expand from the right/left to right/left/bottom.

So, here is the version numbering I am guessing.

Blogs = 7.5
CP UI update = 7.6
User UI update = 8.0

Rick,

Did you take a look at the template method that b2evolution uses?
http://skins.b2evolution.net/
and more developers stuff on this:
http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewforum.php?f=6
and details http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=17115

Because this open source framework is a real good implementation of UI completely removed from app-functionality, and using a plugin structure to install widgets that can be flexible configured on the page. In my opinion this should be the way template design should be implemented everywhere .

BTW, just because something is "open source" doesn't mean it can be added to just any old script; its license has to allow it (such as the Apache2 license)...

The route I've been trying to get Rick to use is much like what PostNuke/PHPNuke use, which already utilize Smarty (which we're already using)