The Results

Content Management

All the modifications for vB that we were aware of were only some Plugins, with their own database-backend, and some ugly page to display them. What we wanted was a real integration into vB. The Idea is to simply create a new thread with the content inside the first post.

But what is needed then?

First you need a way to separate the items from normal threads - what we did is to implement a property "Class", where you can simply set parameters like prefix (for forumdisplay), default sticky-state, and the bbcodes allowed (we added a lot of them but didn't wanted them to be used by normal threads). All easy to set up using the Admin Panel. Just create a usergroup "Newsposter", put some users inside and allow them to create threads with the class "News".

The second thing required was some kind of workflow management - we've choosen a very simple concept here - just a flag "published" - set by creating/editing posts, you can set it to be unpublished - now it can only be seen by Administrators and the thread creator of course and is highlighted using a pink color on forum and thread display.

Coding the mainpage was easy, just some queries, a cache to dramatically increase performance and done.
The result is a fully integrated Content Management System that works exactly like our users want.

The Textparser

The Idea is not very far ... every community has its slang-words, and you often get questions by newbies "What does pr0n mean?". So its a nice idea to have these words highligted in your forums and when pointed at it it displays the description in a tooltip. What we did?
Took the vbglossary-hack (thanks to TWTCommish, user @vb.org), and used its database-concept to highlight the words inside. Additionaly we added a switch to each glossary-term to enable/disable highlighting.
A second feature that comes out of this is product placement. So when the name of one of our partners is written, it will be converted to a href to the homepage. effective and not annoying - exactly what we wanted.

Attachments, Pictures and more

What vB really lacks is the ability to upload multiple attachments per post - so we added that. Then just do a modification to the thread display, hook a caching-engine between, and you get a nice thumbnail-function. For forums that are destined to hold pictures only, we modded the forumsdisplay; preview-thumbnails instead of thread titles. Very nice for our Casemod-Gallery.

What's new?

It's something that really annoyed me in vB - the way it saves the status of unread threads. The problem was - you log in, see new threads, do something else for 15 minutes and all is marked read automatically. That sucks!

So our first idea was to simply increase the timeout-value. Didn't work, because a browser can store only 20 cookies per page. And think of the Traffic when it could handle more!

It was paramount to us to change that, so we implemented a comletely new, database-driven system.
Benefits of this systems are:

- Database-driven, so even when you log in from another machine or Browser you don't miss anything or read it twice
- Hundred percent accurate
- Number of new posts/threads aren't only displayed on the Forums Home Page, they are visible anywhere in the forums.
- When a thread has 2 Pages and you only visit Page one, the Posts from page 2 are still unread.
- Fast: using a caching-engine, the new system is as performant as the old one.