Spotlights

A beautiful and clean presentation of images is an important aspect of every gallery, it can even be considered the uttermost important one. Yet, one should pay equal attention to the uploading and editing capabilities, after all they're the road to add images in first place. We would like to dive into the improved interface of WoltLab Gallery 2.1 and present you the most important innovations.

A great software is not entirely based upon the big features, but also the little things that make you enjoy using it and helping you to accomplish your goals. We would like to introduce you some more useful tweaks and additions below.

WoltLab Blog 2.1 comes along with a handy set of features improving writing and managing articles, we would like to take the opportunity to show you some of them in this spotlight.

Blog 2.1 introduces user-blogs, a personalized blog covering a topic of your choice. Given the permissions users may create several own blogs each dedicated to different aspects and subjects. Users are given the choice to control the visibility of their blogs based on a set of different access levels, for example restrict a blog to be accessible by users they're following only. It is worth noting that moderators can be given the right to override these restrictions to allow checks for questionable content.

The first part already covered a bunch of changes and improvements to the administration control panel, mainly concerning the general usability and speeding up common processes. But wait, there's more.

In this article we introduce the possibility of setting up paid subscriptions in Burning Board 4.1.

Being able to edit posts after they have been published is a great way to deal with typos or add useful information. On the other hand this creates a situation where the original message disappears in the void due to the fact that editing will overwrite the current post. Burning Board 4.1 solves this by adding an edit history for posts which will track prior versions including the ability to restore a specific version, a notice at the post's bottom will hint for stored versions.

The average forum consists of three different types of user groups: Users, Administrators and Moderators. While we have already shown a lot of improvement related to users and administrators, it is time to focus on what has changed for moderators.

We have presented a lot of changes and improvements regarding the general usability as a user. It's about time to take a closer look at the improvements to the administration control panel (ACP).

Following our principle that there is always room for improvements, we have taken a lot of effort to improve the general usability and better interaction with content. Since the release of Burning Board 4.0 we have received a lot of great suggestions and it's time to show them in action.

We have shown a lot of new features in our upcoming version Burning Board 4.1 in the previous threads and we feel that it is time to take a look at the smaller improvements.

In the previous spotlight we have shown the common functions and the general integration into the upcoming version Burning Board 4.1. We have added a few more features which should assist the user in the everyday use and to provide a better WYSIWYG experience.

Burning Board 4.1 will introduce the new editor Redactor, a lightweight and jQuery based WYSIWYG editor. It is superior to the currently used CKEditor in many different ways, it is a lot smaller and loads in fractions of the time required to load CKEditor.

In the past weeks I've talked a lot about front-end improvements and now it's time to take a closer look at what has changed in the ACP. We will deliver a bunch of new features related to the the work with forums and the permission system.

We have received a lot of feedback regarding the anti-spam measures, moderation system and access to the comment system for guests. We want to introduce some handy changes with Burning Board 4.1 which aim to improve the current experience and to properly handling guests and abusive members.

Most owners run their forums with passion and pay for everything that is required to keep it up, but as a community grows one may have to spend a lot of money to maintain it. Burning Board 4.1 offers you a built-in tool to manage ads from third parties (e.g. Google AdSense), enabling you to monetize your community and to earn the money you need to keep it running.

The bigger your community gets, the harder it can be for your users to keep themselves posted. Consider a big community event coming up, but people lose track where and when it occurs?

Almost every software available collects basic statistics on their individual usage and so do forum softwares in general. Everyone has seen these fancy numbers like 123.456 Posts visible on the forum's index, but similar to all these numbers out there, they tell only half the truth.

During development of a new release we usually take a look at every tiny piece of the software and evaluate it's current state. We're overall fine with the conversation system, it serves it purpose and provides a great usability, yet there is always room for small improvements.

User Groups provide forum administrators the ability to manage permissions for users even in large communities and to ease management we already provide an official plugin to set up moderated user groups.

RSS Feeds offer a great opportunity to subscribe to a website and getting notified of related news. With Burning Board 4.1 we're adding the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and provide an automatic creation of corresponding threads.