SurfiOnline

From their announcement made this morning (coincidence, after I made my post?)

The future of LiteBulletin?
Well LiteBulletin was meant to be an exact copy of vBulletin 3 but our mind changed and so our next upcoming version (1.2) will have own templates and a fresh and new designed style which is definately not vB-ish.

What about some vB-like phrases?
Things like “Visitor Message System” reminds too much of vB so we will rename that to “Profile Comment System” as it also describes what you can do with that. There is also a few more things we will rename and change to make LiteBulletin much more original.
Until now LiteBulletin could be called “LitevBulletin” or “vBulletin Lite” as it is too much like it.

Read the full announcement.

It’s good to see (I’m assuming they’ve read my post) that they’re respecting our wishes with why we opened MyBB up and just how cheap creating a vBulletin knock-off really is. Still waiting on the website, favourite icon etc to change. We’ll see if that magically happens today too.

When we relaunched MyBB under the GNU GPL license (open source), we did so to help out the open source community and to hopefully see something new and original. We also did so as we believed we’d receive some valuable contributions back to the MyBB community. We didn’t release MyBB under the GNU GPL so people would take MyBB, and turn it in to cheap clone of a competitors product. Whilst there’s technically nothing wrong or illegal doing so, it’s disappointing to see.

LiteSoft are developing LiteBulletin, a direct clone of the vBulletin user interface plastered directly on top of MyBB with the addition of vBulletin’s recently developed social networking features (social profiles, comments, etc). Of course, LiteSoft did this and at the same time vBulletin caught up with them as (I’ve heard) they were using actual images from vBulletin itself. They’ve now changed the infringing material.

I just thought I’d also take a look at the LiteSoft website to see what they’re up to with their project, and not surprisingly they’ve also essentially taken the layout of the vBulletin website! Do they not have the ability to come up with a design and content themselves? Even the spacing is essentially pixel for pixel! (You’ll notice their screenshot too contains the infringed theme images)

Don’t even get me started on the favourite icon…

The reason why this is particularly annoying to myself (and no doubt some of the MyBB team) is that this isn’t going to help the “MyBB is a vBulletin clone” comments that come past every so often. Whilst LiteBulletin is it’s own separate product, it’s based directly of MyBB and MyBB is mentioned in both the source code and on the footer of the forums.

The LiteBulletin Features page too, seems to bare quite a few similarities in layout to the vBulletin Features page whilst the content bares quite a few similarities to the MyBB Features page. (Whilst MyBB is GNU GPL software, our website and the content of our website is NOT)

If imitation is indeed considered a sincere form of flattery, vBulletin must be pretty happy right now.

If you’re thinking of forking MyBB, then please, I urge you to not be like LiteBulletin – instead develop something new and unique. Improve upon what everyone’s expectations of discussion software is.

When you stop writing for months, and your general participation on the Internet drops, there’s always those few who are pondering what happened, where you’ve been and what you’re up to. It was last October that I’d actually written – and dare I say it, last January that I’d actually visited this place. In an attempt to start writing some more, I’m back.

The last 6 months have been nothing but a whirlwind of crazy insane for me.

• In October 2007, I took up a job as developer at a Sydney based web application company called Interspire. I’m working on what is the ultimate e-commerce and shopping cart software, Interspire Shopping Cart. I briefly touched on this in a previous post that I’ll be rewriting again shortly.

  I’m working with a great bunch of people – everyone knows their stuff and I’ve learnt a lot as well since starting. There’s a lot of great things that’ll be coming out of Interspire over the next 12 months and I’m especially excited with what we’ve got in store for Interspire Shopping Cart. We’ve got new people starting left, right and centre who we’re training up as quick as possible.

  Speaking of Shopping Cart, the release has been exceptional – we’ve seen lots of feedback, we’re loving what people are getting up to with the product and the stores they’re creating. A lot of the feedback focuses on the usability and ease of use of our Interspire Shopping Cart compared to our competitors. This is something we aim for at Interspire and can do very well – developing very easy to use but powerful web applications.

• Having purchased a Macbook Pro in December, I’ve slowly been transitioning to using Mac OS X full time (compared to a split share between my desktop and my Mac Mini). I’ve now essentially made the full time switch to Mac OS X, even using it for full time development at work – it’s amazing how much more productive you feel when you make the move.
• That being said, I’ve also been investing a fair amount of resources in to Microsoft Windows Home Server. It’s made managing the network at home, ridiculously easy without having to worry about backups, remote access and file sharing. The expanding file system by simply plugging in another hard drive make it ridiculously to expand. I’ve now racked up nearly 2.5 TB of storage in my home server and it’s all exclusively managed by the server itself – I don’t need to worry about shuffling anything around or if I’m going to run out of space on one volume/disk.
• In January 2008, we headed down to to Lake Conjola, as we do every year. This year was no exception to the norm with over 2,000 photos being taken – most of which I am still yet to finish post-processing before uploading them to flickr. By the way, am I the only one who hates the fact that they support video now?
• When Apple announced the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK, I decided it would be an excellent time to continue learning Objective C so that once the iPhone launches in Australia (which will hopefully be this July and include 3G as rumored), I can take advantage of the powerful platform it provides. I’m still reading and learning so there isn’t much to show for it at the moment.
• 6 months ago, if you’d told me to “go and read a book”, I’d have told you that I’d rather do other things to waste my times. Not only did I think books were a waste of time for myself I couldn’t understand how some people could just sit and read. These days it’s different. I read a lot of the time either on the train to work or on the way home during the week and sometimes at night when I’m not up to something else. I’ve been buying up from Amazon with still more books waiting to be delivered.
• Marketing is something I never thought I’d be interested in. Recently though, and since starting at Interspire, I’ve taken a bit of a liking to marketing and am eagerly learning as much as I can – especially about how you push a product in to an already very competitive market (e-commerce applications), and push your company as a global brand. I’ve learnt a lot regarding Search Engine Optimisation too. Previously I already knew a lot but now I’m learning all of the untold tips and tricks the most successful companies use to earn higher rankings.
• I’m reducing my participation with the MyBB Group. We’re doing some amazing things, but sadly I don’t have the time to develop the product like I used to. I’m now moving in to a more administrative role overseeing the product – the product development manager whilst our excellent development team continue to put together what is already the web’s most powerful free forum application. As difficult as this for me to do, it’s in the best interests of the project.
• Photography is something I’ve always been interested in but never really had the time to take it up properly as a hobby. Sadly, that hasn’t changed because I still don’t have the time. I’ve been reading up a bit recently about lightbox photography – white boxes you put objects in to take photos of and I’ve just ordered my own. It’ll be interesting when it arrives as to see what I can accomplish with it. I’m also wanting to get in to professional/model photography but not too sure where to start with that one.

That’s about all I’ve got in the tank for now. I’m really enjoying what I’m up to these days but don’t nearly have the amount of free time that I once did – the trade off though is that I’m (especially at work) working on a lot of exciting and new things. I’ll be back again shortly with some more adventures.

XMB was the first bulletin board package I developed with – way back in 2000. Things were great back then and so was XMB.

XMB is what inspired me to learn PHP and MySQL. It was one of the best open source/free forum packages back in its day and I was using it on a few sites. I began creating modifications for XMB, features which you’ll still find in the core package today and eventually moved on to be a part of the team. I met so many new people in the world of web development who taught me so much.

I bought some of the most important features XMB has to the system whilst I was developing code modifications and was on the development team. To name just a few,

• Email notification of new replies
• Pagination for the thread view
• Database stored template system
• “Code buttons” and clickable smilies
• Powerful banning and pruning features

In December 2001 Staff changed and the project was handed over to someone else and I stepped up to one of the lead development roles. From this point on, we released XMB versions 1.1, 1.2 and XMB 1.5. We were actively developing the next release of XMB 1.6.

Eventually the owner at the time then sold out, for some unspecified amount – of which we received nothing and were doing all the work (the owner did not develop the software but left it all to us). AventureMedia were the new owners of XMB and all of the existing developers including myself left the project to work on our spin-off, DevBB whilst we prepared early versions of MyBB for public release.

Now, AventureMedia did a bit of the work, but a lot of the development was done by people who volunteered for the project who had no affiliation with DevBB. AventureMedia turned XMB from a nice looking forum package to something horrible with a small fixed width layout and very small text.

AventureMedia didn’t stop there, they continued with the product and it eventually began to die out. They didn’t seem to be bringing anything new or innovative to the project and people seemed to be switching to other readily available solutions. AventureMedia began using XMB to exclusively promote their hosting company. The Announcements project was cluttered with “special offers” for web and email hosting and the site was littered with ads for AventureHost/AventureMedia.

In March this year, Richard announced that XMB was obtained by iEntry because AventureMedia no longer had time for the project. Finally, he admitted it. iEntry were announced as experts in the field of open source software. After the acquisition, a new plethora of advertising was plastered all over the XMB website and XMB forums for iEntry – general banner ads, nothing specific to their company.

2 months later, iEntry make their official acquisition announcement and state the future of XMB. They left their users in the dark for 2 months and during that two months they did what, nothing?

Jump forward to the present time and they’ve still done nothing with the project but have promised things will get underway soon but have done nothing but ensure the banner ads on the site are still running. Thankfully though, the community has started to catch on to this and aren’t happy that they’re being neglected. I can only hope for their sake that something is done soon.

I posted a screenshot of the MyBB 1.4 “Select a buddy” window when composing a private message, so why not the actual buddy list?

In MyBB 1.2, we removed the “buddy select” when composing a private message. It didn’t look very good and at that time we didn’t think much of it – we didn’t know how many people actually were making use of the buddy system for some reason or another.

It’s back in style with MyBB 1.4 and my latest commit. Styled similarly to the “Invite a contact into this conversation” window in Windows Live Messenger, the 1.4 buddy selection window (loaded in via Ajax) allows you to select multiple buddies from your list and add them all as recipients of the private message you’re composing.

So normally we wouldn’t go all out and completely reveal a new and upcoming feature in MyBB 1.4 but this time, it’s an exception. If you’ve read the MyBB Games interview with Ryan then you’d have heard about the feature already.

You guys asked for it, we promised it for 1.2 but sadly had to leave the feature out – but we’re delivering now. MyBB 1.4 will include a brand new and completely redeveloped calendar/event system. From ranged and recurring events through to multiple calendars and moderation tools, we’ve got the features you’d see in a commercial bulletin board for free.

So lets take a look at what I spent pain staking nights writing.

Refreshed Monthly View

New Weekly View

You can now drill down in to a weekly overview by clicking the small >> arrows on the monthly view. It’s smart and will show you an entire week and where different months end/begin.

Event View

The detailed event view page has also been refreshed.

The Ranged and Recurring Options

When creating an event you’ve got a fair amount of options in regards to the date and time you want it to show up on. We needed an interface which didn’t just throw it all at you. Similarly to the Google Calendar event creation – we show and hide the different options for each recurrence type depending on what you’ve selected.

You can also see here you can specify which time zone you want the event to show up in.

Jump Between Calendars

With support for multiple calendars, you need a way to move between them!

Mini Calendars

You can also generate mini versions of the monthly calendar view that even link to days with events on them. Stock with MyBB, these are shown on the weekly view of the calendar but you can easily generate your own with the call of a function.

And More?

There’s some things I can’t show you right now – essentially our Admin CP interface for managing calendars and permissions but it’s very powerful. We’re not ready to release screenshots of our new Admin CP at this time.

• Each calendar can have permissions for groups assigned to it – you can make a particular group a moderator of the calendar for example. Otherwise calendar permissions are inherited from the default group permissions.
• Ability to set the start day of the week for each calendar – for example set the start of the week to a Monday instead of the default Sunday
• Don’t want to show birthdays on a particular calendar? Disable them. Want to limit the number of events before “X Events” is shown? Too easy.
• Ability to specify if you wish to moderate all events for a particular calendar before they’re visible (with calendar permissions for groups able to bypass the moderation queue)
• Enable HTML, MyCode, IMG Code and smilies on a per-calendar basis.

Stay tuned for another MyBB update some time soon.

MyBB Fans are hosting a MyBB 1.2 theming contest where over $200 in cash prizes are being given away to the top 5 themes. Take out first place and you get $100 USD from myself, or take out second receive $50 USD from DrPoodle.

We want lots of new themes for MyBB and would like anyone who is able to participate to join in and have some fun – I’ll even feature some of the themes on the new MyBB site.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

You don’t block the home page for MyBB but you block the community forums. I guess MyBB will no longer be used as a classroom resource for Tafe.

Talk about rush hour.