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WebWiz-Bruce 
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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 Topic: Web Wiz Forums Development Blog
Posted: 17 February 2005 at 9:26am |
This topic is the Development Blog for version 8 of Web Wiz Forums, so that people have an idea of how things are going.
Please don't ask ' WHEN WILL VERSION 8 BE RELEASED' as the answer is, ' I do NOT know' as it depends on how long various parts take to develop and how much free time I get to work on it.
If you have any suggestions please post them in the following topic:-
Version 8 Suggestions - POST THEM HERE!!
Version 8 is going to concentrate on 1. Performance and 2. Improving current features, once this is done adding new features will be looked at.
Major features that are not required by most uses and would drastically
effect performance, such as galleries, are not going to be
added. If users want such additions there are many portal systems based
on Web Wiz Forums that do have these features.
Web Wiz Forums is focused to be one of the fastest performing ASP Bulletin Board Systems.
Version 8.0 - Released
Version 7.x to Version 8 Upgrade Tool v 1 -Released
Edited by -boRg- - 23 April 2006 at 9:48am
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WebWiz-Bruce
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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Posted: 20 February 2005 at 12:51pm |
Items that have been completed so far:-
- System to approve new posts before they are displayed
- Sub forums
- New Web Wiz Rich Text Editor version 3 integration
- Quick Reply Box
- Editing of Polls
- Show 'Today' and 'Yesterday' for dates
- International Date function used for dates to prevent date issues between database versions and servers
- Improved performance on Active Topic page
- Numerous bug fixes and small improvements
- Improved performance for Members list by over 3000% !!!!!
- Improved performance for topic and post pages
- Admin approval of new members before they can activate their accounts
- New permissions system now complete
- Improved performance by removing recordset paging and using arrays instead
- New more powerful searching, with better performance and security
- Improved security filters
- Improved HTML striping function
- Full CSS Skin for simpler implementation
- Better Email Activation system
- mySQL database support
- Global time offset to set the forum to a different date to that of the server
- Improved the way images and files are uploaded, so when a post or topic is deleted any files associated withit are also deleted
- New CSS styles now implemented for admin section
- Page links, to multiple pages posts and topics, now on the top of the page as well as the bottom
- Support for Skype in user profile
- Improved Profile page, using full page instead of pop-up
- Now message icons to be displayed next to topic
- SMTP server authentication
- Skin CSS file and image location to be set from admin area for simpler setup of new skin
- Improved poll vote saving to prevent users from multiple voting
- Improved forum stats found on the forum index page
- Active users page now also shows location
- IP addresses shown in active users page in admin area
- New login system using cookie-less sessions for those sites and users who have problems using cookies.
- Improved new session system so that a database is used for sites on load balanced servers or using web gardens and web farms
- New Calender System
- Better statistics (today's birthdays)
- Admin approve member
- RSS XML Feeds for Last 10 posts, across all forums and individual forums
- Online RSS Feed viewer using XLST Style Sheet
- RSS Feed for Calendar Events and Individual Topics
- Windows Authentication
Edited by -boRg- - 03 April 2006 at 6:37pm
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WebWiz-Bruce
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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Posted: 22 February 2005 at 12:01pm |
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The admin section for creating, removing, and changing Sub Forums is now complete.
The new forums permission system is well under way and the admin section
for it is almost complete. I just need to do some cleaning up and redo
the individual member permission pages.
As the moderated posts feature is part of the permissions system, and
as the main forum pages for this are complete, apart from some cleaning
up, the moderated posts feature will be 98% complete with the finishing
of the new forum permission system.
I hope to have the admin section for the new permissions system complete by the end of this week.
In the main forum the new permission system will be added as I go
through the pages increasing performance by placing recordsets into
arrays. The aim, hopefully, is to have a maximum of 3 to 4 database
queries per page, and hopefully with most pages this will be less.
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WebWiz-Bruce
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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Posted: 02 March 2005 at 7:18am |
The admin side of the new permissions system is now complete.
This is a little bit later than the end of last week, which I
predicted, due to not having as much time to spend coding as I thought.
The permissions system simplifies the old permission system by removing the
old generic forum permissions (which even I found complicated to setup), instead
now you create permissions for each group on the forum using a grid
(pictured below).
By using this system instead, not only does it make setting and
checking permissions when setting up simpler, it also means that it is easier to check
permissions when running database queries as all permissions are now kept in the one database table.
This will mean that I will be able to improve performance as getting
the users forum permissions will require less database
queries per page, speeding up the performance of the forums engine.
Individual member permissions are also still available, though a new page, and will override
group permissions on those forums individual member permissions are set.
The next job I plan on doing is to speed up the performance of the
forums engine, I hoping that I can reduce database queries on pages by
at least 50% and use arrays to speed up the processing time. Whilst
doing this I also plan on implanting the new permissions, sub forums,
and post moderation features into the main forum pages.
I hope to have this finshed within the next 2 to 4 weeks, and have an
aplha 2 version for testing these new features on this site.
Edited by -boRg- - 02 March 2005 at 7:22am
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WebWiz-Bruce
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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Posted: 14 March 2005 at 5:14am |
Progress last week on wwf v 8 has been slow as I spent most of last
week in bed with a nasty bug and was helping out with a Tsunami Charity
gig this weekend.
But I have now finished improving the performance on the main forum page (default.asp).
Thanks to the new permissions system and adding the following fields to the database table tblForum:-
1. Last_post_author_ID - data type = integer - default value 1
2. Last_post_date - data type = date/time - default value = now()/GetDate()
I have increased performance and database hits by quite allot.
In the old version if you have 10 forums in 2 categories it required 40!!! database queries to get all the required data.
Now with the new system I use 1 database query to get all the
information for all categories, forums, permissions, etc. This cuts
down on database hits by an incredible amount and also improves
performance by over 1000% in most cases.
To further improve performance the returned database query is placed
into an array before displaying it on
the screen.
This should mean that for those experiencing performance problems
because they have allot of forums, the next version shouldn't keep a
high performance level, no matter how many forums you have.
The next task is to work on the Topics page, to increase performance, in the same sort of way.
Edited by -boRg- - 15 March 2005 at 5:03am
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WebWiz-Bruce
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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Posted: 18 March 2005 at 1:00pm |
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To keep everyone updated on the progress of version 8, all this week I
have been working on improving performance on the Forums Topics and the
page displaying the posts.
Most of the week has been spent messing with SQL queries to try and cut
down on database calls and also with the use of arrays this has
improved performance on these pages.
The Forum Topics page, has gone from over 52 db calls for a site with
10 forums and 20 topics displayed per page, down to just 4 queries max
including getting sub forums that will be in the next version.
The Forum Posts page has also had db calls reduced as well in the same
way and also using an array for for the posts to speed things up.
Database calls for this page are now down to a maximum of 3 queries.
I'm going to carry on working through all the files to improve
performance, cut down on database calls, and change the pages to
support the new permissions system.
Hopefully now these main pages are done, the other pages should be much quicker to work through.
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WebWiz-Bruce
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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Posted: 10 April 2005 at 6:24am |
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Progress update:-
As each file is being re-written to improve performance and integrate
the new permissions system, as I am going through the files I am also
putting in some new features to save going back at a later stage to
re-write the file again.
Over the last few weeks I have been re-writing the files to post,
reply, edit, etc. posts in the forum. This has been quite a complex
task as there is additional data to also store in the database when
posting a message as well as the new permissions system and improving
performance.
While re-writing the post system I'm also changing the way people will
post replies. I'm changing the present reply box to a quick reply box
with less features, if people want the full reply box they can click a
button to be taken to the full reply box with all the features. This
should improve performance of the forum and cut bandwidth usage as
less images etc. will need to be loaded on each page where there is a
reply box.
While working my way through this I shall also look into adding a way to edit polls.
As I've got allot of other work on at the moment, I'm hoping to have
the new post, edit, reply, etc. system finished within the next 2 to 3
weeks.
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WebWiz-Bruce
Admin Group
Web Wiz Developer
Joined: 03 September 2001
Location: Bournemouth
Status: Offline
Points: 9844
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Posted: 09 May 2005 at 11:35am |
Work on creating a new web site for www.bassbound.com took a bit longer than I thought due to the size the site ended up being.
However, it is now complete, so work is again under way on version 8 of Web Wiz Forums.
I'm still working through the files to integrate the new permissions system and increase performance.
I am really pleased at the amount of extra performance I am getting
from the files I have already done, but as I am being very thorough work
is progressing slowly, but it sold be well worth the wait 
Edited by -boRg- - 18 July 2005 at 5:26am
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Web Wiz Forums Development Blog