SurfiOnline

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.

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.

Talk about rush hour.

DennisTT has a rant about people removing the copyright in MyBB.

We’re hard working and honest people bringing you a quality product. Why can’t you say thank you by leaving 2 simple & small lines of text on the bottom of your forum?

Oh, and don’t think we can’t find your forum if you decide you’re going to remove the copyright.

We’ve recently had a few people ask on the MyBB Community Forums how they can subscribe to a thread they reply to but not receive email notifications of new replies. They didn’t realise that we already had this functionality – you can add threads to a “favourites list”.

Why didn’t they realise this? The two leading commercial bulletin boards, vBulletin and Invision Power Board have both set the standard in user expectations on how features should work. Both of these commercial and highly popular bulletin board scripts allow users to add threads to their subscriptions list without receiving email notifications.

This creates a bit of a problem for us in MyBB as we’ve got this feature – favourite threads, which nobody actually uses or knows what it does because most are used to the ability to subscribe to a thread and elect to receive no email notifications of new replies.

In an attempt to “normalise” the front end functionality between bulletin boards, MyBB 1.4 now adopts a similar approach – we’ve completely scrapped the separate interface for favourite threads and merged the functionality in to the subscriptions system. This isn’t about us copying x or y, it’s about us bringing an interface to MyBB which hopefully brings some sort of small amount standardisation to the market.

People usually visit several different forums on the internet and interact with each of them. They’re most probably powered by several different forum scripts too and the problem with this is that usually features are worded differently or behave differently between these applications and uses do get lost and don’t know how to perform a task they can on another board. We need to help with this in some cases so we can provide a better experience for your users.

To explain a little better, the new subscriptions system has the following functionality:

• When registering or editing their profile, users can select their default thread subscription method: Do not subscribe to threads, subscribe to threads but don’t send notification emails or subscribe to threads and receive instant notification emails.
• Users can select which type of notification they want when making a new thread or posting a reply - the same options as above.
• When clicking the “Subscribe to thread” link in threads, users are presented with a screen allowing them to choose how they’d like to be notified of new replies (not at all or instant notification)
• The subscriptions page now lists all subscriptions, you’re notification method for new replies and looks similar to the standard thread listing pages.

The options you’re shown when subscribing to a thread from the show thread page.

Your subscriptions list - looking similar to the thread listing & containing checkboxes to manage the subscriptions.

Last week I wrote about my customised version of TinyMCE which I whipped up because a client needed a WYSIWYG editor to manage content on their site, that is one without a layout that does not suck.

My solution:

A nicer looking TinyMCE editor which is easier to use too.

Several people requested I release it so that is what I’m doing.

View an online Demo

Download surfi_tinymce.zip

The download archive contains instructions (readme.html) on how to implement and customise the appearance of the editor to how you’d like.

As far as I know, it is completely compatible with the following browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox 2.0
• Internet Explorer 6
• Internet Explorer 7

I’d love to see what layouts people come up with, where they’re using my modified TinyMCE theme and any bugs they have to report or suggestions for things they’d like to see.

Wow, two posts in one day. Something must be wrong with me.

With MyBB we want everyone to have the best possible “out of the box experience” as possible. An “out of the box experience” is the experience a user has with MyBB directly after they’ve installed it - after all, first impressions do count.

MyBB 1.4 is becoming more and more intelligent. We recognise what users want, that they want to have a functional system which they enjoy to use and requires little time and effort to configure.

The “Search Engine Friendly URLs” option in MyBB 1.4 is an example of how MyBB is giving you want you want right out of the box. For those who don’t know, search engine friendly URLs convert big long URLs in to much shorter and easier to type URLs. They’re also very beneficial to search engine optimization and improving your page rank. This is a feature users have wanted us to support for a long time and have had to rely on plugins to provide the same functionality however with varying results.

An example of search engine friendly URLs would be as follows:

Old URL: showthread.php?tid=10&page=2
New and Improved URL: thread10-2.html

Now I estimate that a lot of people will turn to us and ask us how they enable this functionality or do we have it in MyBB at all.

MyBB 1.4 will automatically enable search engine friendly URLs if your server supports them. (Apache based servers only at this stage)

This means that after you install MyBB, if your server supports search engine friendly URLs they will automatically be enabled without you being required to perform any additional configuration.

Of course, we support the automatic detection along with manual overrides to enable or disable the functionality for when you wish to override the automatic detection or disable the functionality completely.

Stay tuned for more information on MyBB 1.4 in the coming weeks (pending we feel like releasing some of our much kept secrets)

So today for something different I’m going to have a bit of a guest author on my blog to talk about something they’ve been working on in MyBB. That person would be Tikitiki and the feature would be the MyBB import system. Ryan actually wrote this article previously but he’s decoded he may be removing his blog soon but still wants to be famous people to know about what he’s been up to.

So, below Ryan talks about the MyBB conversion wizard. Though it is actually a lot more than that. It could be called the “MyBB Merge Wizard”. Essentially what you can do is import as many different bulletin boards as you want in to your one copy of MyBB - and you can even merge one or more copies of MyBB as well. Now keep in mind when you’re reading below that the system isn’t finished yet but is currently under active development - there is lots of work to be completed.

The design (well idea) of the system and how the base functionality works was designed by myself over a year ago. Ryan rewrote it all, I rewrote some bits, Dennis touched it up a bit further and now Ryan has taken back over and is pushing development right ahead.

The whole point of the MyBB Import system is that you can merge databases. You can also select what to import, and what not to import. Now it’s not finished, but I’ll explain what the system does and how easy it really is!

The first step - The welcome page! Not all of the converters have been finished, but this shows what will be done by the time 1.4 is released. Currently we’ve finished: MyBB (Merge), SMF, phpBB 2, and PunBB.

The second step shows you the module list. You’ll need to fill in your database configuration details as shown in the picture below.

This page is where you’ll fill in the database details of the database you want to import.

Once you are done with that, you’ll get back to the module page. Here you’ll see that you can select a module to start out from. These modules need to be done first because data is required from these modules for other modules.

Here you’ll input how many of the module you selected you want to import. Once you’re done with this, click next to continue.

At this screen, it shows you whats been run in the module. Click next to continue; If there are more it will continue on with the module, otherwise you’ll be sent back to the module list as depicted in the picture below.

Here you’ll be able to select the next module, or, if your finished, you can press “Clean Up” and it will show the next page.

The is the last page of the importer before you can visit your new imported board

You can also pause modules so you don’t have to run them all. Say you only wanted to import 10 threads. And of course, you can resume the module if you wish to continue importing them, but we’ll get into that more later