SurfiOnline

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.

Something a lot of us have been expecting for a long time- and such a greater way to gain some marketshare too. They’ve also released Safari v3 for Mac OS X.

It’s currently beta and can of course be fetched from the Apple website. It contains everything the OS X release does and the blazingly fast WebKit rendering engine.. oh my.

If you have problems installing it on Vista, you may need to open an elevated command prompt (Right click > Run as Administrator) and type the following:
regsvr32 vbscript.dll
It seems the Install Shield installer isn’t corectly detecting some of the Windows components.

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.