UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Suggestions and Feedback What's next?

I do think that would work.

You'd have to remember also to require it in all the files that needed it

1. Site Integration.
2. Templates.
3. Modularity.
4. Module system for hacks.

I was away since that post, here is my vote:

1. Membership integration (+++)
2. Templates
3. Modular architecture
4. Contents integration (example here)
5. Email mirroring (here and here)
5. Usenet gateway/integration (see here)

Hi Scream,

what kind of timeframe are you looking at for this?

I'm looking at getting this done in the next 1-2 weeks but I don't imagine your stuff will be ready that soon.

thanks,

Kurt

Don't really have a timeframe on this yet. I expected 5.3 to be the stable version so I could start working on new features, but there were a few more bugs found so I've needed to do another minor update. Still working on the PHP version of 5.4.4 although I didn't get much done this past week with everything going on.

I'm late to this, but I have a completely different suggestion.

How 'bout: hire someone to write really, really, REALLY good documentation. Complete, with hand-holding and tutorials and tips and everything.

To pay for this, SELL it. You'd surely get enough users (not the regulars here, most of whom don't need it, of course) to shell out, say, $25 per that you could afford to hire a really good technical writer. And even if it doesn't break even, it's worth subsidizing, since it will open up your market to less tech-oriented people.

another bonus: you could plunder some of the language to better explain functions in help files and on this site.

You could even use print-on-demand to do a bound version.

[Scream, if you want, feel free to email me and I'll help you brainstorm....and explain about print-on-demand].

I have read a great many wonderful suggestions in this thread - great responses from everyone. I'm not going to try and repeat them. Any others I have were already been posted in the feedback forum.

I would like to request one thing before you move on to these wonderful new concepts Scream. You know I've been using your product for a very long time now and I want to see it continue to be successful. I really seriously believe at this stage you need to stop worrying about what comes next for a short period and focus on the existing code. Go back through and clean it up, clean up all of the small oddities and bugs that are found in even 5.4.4. Each time you come out with a new release, I am forced to go back and fix issues that go back several versions, re-introducing hacks, modifications, etc. There are a number of odd behaviors that the product now has and I think it’d be a good idea to get them all cleaned up before adding anything new.

I think you should start another thread like this and ask, “What can we do/change to improve the behavior, functionality and quality of the current features?” Then collect that information and go to town solidifying an already great product. Then once you have that code 100% bug free and working as designed, move on to new features. You know me, I’ve been asking for templates since I first started using W3T - along with site integration. But I’ve waited this long; I can wait a couple more months. []/testimages/icons/wink.gif[/] I’d much rather see the current system refined and cleaned up before introducing more issues into the mix.

Hear. Hear.

I agree... haven't been using it as long as you but... I did have the joys of upgrading my system from 5.4.3 to 5.4.4 and thank goodness for Araxis Merge I would still be sitting here today working on it trying to merge all the mods I have done into the new system... Lets just clean it up... There is alot of wasted code I am noticing...

This is something that I've been leaning towards so I'm glad you brought it up.[]/testimages/icons/wink.gif[/]

I'm going to second this and add to it a little. I'd like to see a very strong focus on improving performance for the software and more of a focus on helping people optimize their servers. I've been lurking around on vbulletin's site and it seems there are more than a few sites over there that hit 500-800 users online (some at peak others pretty continuous) and it does appear they are doing this on one box, many running other sites on the servers as well. I realize they don't have the threaded option, but frankly with w3t it seems like if you have more than 100 users online the suggestion is to buy a second server. Honestly, I don't think that's an acceptable answer (please excuse my frankness here).

We have a pretty beefy box and it's the forums that kill us, no question. We recently installed a second mysql binary specifically for the forums and when we get any sort of load on the forums and watch the CPU usage jump up to 80%+ in a heartbeat for that mysql daemon. It doesn't take much to get it there. And the number of queries per second is just crazy.

I'd really like to see you spend monster time (or hire a mysql guru) to really look at the structure of the database and tables, the relationships between everything and all the queries the system produces to really trick out this bad boy. Right now it's generating way way way too many queries, especially in the threaded areas. And what I see regulary in the slow query log are really just three or four of the queries that come in over and over again. And have options in the config and setup for things like multiple tables for forum posts using categories to group them in tables where they will improve performance by splitting up things like that. I think a goal of achieving something like 500 (recurring) to 750 (peak) users online on a single server, of course with certain parameters set (ie intel based hardware platform, o/s, mysql binary version, table types, specific my.cnf options, etc..) that can be recreated by your customers is not an unrealistic one.

Just my $0.02