There are a lot of other ideas a forum could be improved - task is to fully melt content management and community ... haven't seen any project that does this as well as we need it til now.
Would I again choose vB as a codebase? to be honest: no. The monolithic way vB is designed often was a pain in the ass when I had to change anything. Don't get me wrong, it's just obvious that vB is a product that has grown over the years. good when you don't want to throw something completely new at your community with every version, but bad for developers. I got some experience with vB's code - some concepts are very interesting, e.g. the way something is cached to improve performance, on the other hand my head often made contact with the table due to the monolithic approach mentioned above. Let's just say I think I know WHY vb.com is developing a completely new version, I'm excited to see it when it's done.
But I still think that it wouldn't be the thing we want. As mentioned above we want a system that fully integrates all the communities needs into one standarized interface - flexible, fast, blah blah. Going away from these lousy concept every second portal-engine offers, module for this, module for that; this just sucks! What the User really wants is integration!
I'll give an example: The user comes to our frontpage, reads some review about on of the new graphics-cards. From there he can directly participate in discussions (The the discussions themself will reveal possibilities today only known from good mail-clients), about these topics, read reviews about other cards, compare them and can directly buy the hardware from our site - directly without anything else to do, and he will be billed through his membership-account. The site itself will adapt itself to exactly fit the users intrests and surfing style. Powerful customization features will help him to accomplish this. The big picture is to offer our members a whole new, very efficient surfing experience, giving them no need to even visit other webpages of its kind anymore.
So the mission for the future is to create such a beast - hard to do, but we have a very clear picture of what it will be. stay tuned.
If you are interested in v4, or in details regarding the new project mentioned above (I'm currently seeking for partners supporting the development), feel free to contact me -
