Innovative package management
With our Community Framework we established an innovative and modern base for community software, every recent product created by WoltLab uses this framework. The package management system is the framework's key feature - it allows a clean separation of many different components.
Installing new products and extensions require only a few mouse clicks, without ever touching the source code or using an FTP-application. Developers can contribute extensions for your existing packages: Development effort will be decreased to an absolute minimum, since the framework handles the most important features e.g. database access and provides an easy to use interface. Last but not least our customers benefit from this separation as it massively reduces the possibility for security-critical holes.
If there are any bugs in an application, you can fix them in a single file and the changes apply everywhere. Updates and maintenance are easy and time-saving - time is money!
Modern and open standards
Common standards guarantee a flawless communication between humans and machines or machines among themselves.
We focused our development on semantic structured documents and a valid XHTML 1.1 output, providing a maximum of compatibility: People with impairments can visit your board and read its contents without unnecessary barriers.
Furthermore we draw a clean line between content and design, you may modify the complete visual appearance using CSS without manipulating the structure of any document, reducing the possibility of any issues during update process.
Our software is based upon the open-source programming language PHP 5 featuring a complete object-oriented source code. At this time only the open-source database MySQL is supported as it is wide-spread and charge-free - support for other database systems are underway.
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (“SEO”) is one of the latest buzzwords around, but have you ever found a vendor going into detail? Usually their SEO-software does nothing or makes use of forbidden techniques, e.g. specially-crafted pages for search spiders. From time by time search engines verify the techniques used by a page and if they encounter forbidden ones, your page would be instantly blacklisted from their search index. We provide you our long-standing know-how about the major aspects of SEO and would like to share our knowledge with you.
Each document used in our software features a semantic structure, improving search spider's understanding of your page and results in a higher ranking. Any unstructured and high-maintenance table structure was removed from our products and replaced them with correctly marked headlines, paragraphs and lists.
Burning Board does not require specially-crafted pages for search spiders, our SEO engine parses the whole content right before it will be transmitted to the viewer.
Next generation search engine optimization: Hyperlinks contain search terms and every link pointing to threads and posts is human-readable – improves your site rank and your users experience. Unlike many other vendors which require you to pay for this feature, we treat it rather essential – we provide it for free!
Events - Modifications redefined
PHP 5 does not provide any solution for throwing events - well known from e.g. Java - but are essential for a modern software architecture. We introduced an own event system, enabling developers to create so called “event listener”, waiting for defined events to happen. Once an event is thrown, you may execute any programming code you want and access all current environment variables. This way developers can create and distribute extensions which do not modify the original source code.
Caching
Frequent database queries slow down every web application - we have a solution for this issue! Our advanced caching system has the ability to cache data either on file-system or remotely on a “memached”-server. Burning Board 3 makes an extensive use of caching - you will notice the amazing performance of our products.
Time-controlled tasks (Cronjobs)
Each software include periodic tasks for multiple reasons, also known as “cronjobs” - unfortunately not every server or web-space package offers cronjobs.
We created our own system for cronjobs, which are primary used for maintenance reasons, e.g. a hourly cleanup for expired sessions. Furthermore you may define your own tasks for any purpose.
Next generation template system
Our software uses an advanced template system for our software's document structure, it is derived from the template engine “Smarty”. Besides it has a lot of similarities concerning the syntax, the whole system was developed from scratch. This way we can provide a maximum of performance and accessibility - perfect integration into our software products.
Burning Board separates templates and programming code, allowing you to modify each document's structure without any prior knowledge of PHP.
