Web Wiz Forums Development Blog

A few poeple have been complaining about where the next version of Web Wiz Forums is, so I thought I had better post this message.

Version 8 is still being writen but every single one of the aprox. 200 files is being re-writen, so far I have spent around 1500 hours re-writing files, and I'm afraid that it will take more time to complete the rest then add new features that people have been asking for.

Also the new Web Wiz RTE v3 to be included in Web Wiz Forums version 8 took me over 1000 hours and 7 to 8 months to develop and fully test which has delayed things slightly more for Web Wiz Forums.

The new permissions system for Web Wiz Forums version 8 is now complete, with almost every file needing to be re-written.

All recordset paging has now been removed and instead arrays are used using 'GetRows()'. This has improved performance by over 200% on all pages that were using recordset paging.

The next part will be to re-design and re-write the search feature of Web Wiz Forums. The idea is to make the search feature more flexible and powerful and at the same time improve performance and security.

Edited by -boRg- - 11 November 2005 at 8:48am

Finally after 2 weeks of solid work late into the night (most nights about 1am and starting again by 9am), I have re-written all public viewable HTML pages by hand to add in the new CSS.

This has a few benefits, because old browsers like Netscape 4 are no-loner a basis for compatibility all the tables, colours, fonts, etc. are done through 1 CSS file.

This means that HTML file sizes are much smaller and render faster in browsers, and by updating the HTML by hand it is much cleaner and I've converted it to XHTML.

New skins should be simpler to implement by just editing 1 CSS file, however, I am still deciding whether to make it so that new skins can be implemented from the admin area, with an option to allow users to choose their own skins within the forum. Please comment on this in the version 8 suggestion post.

The look of the forum has also been changed at the same time, with a more uniformed look and new features like changing the order of lists (topics, posts, etc.) and page links between multiple pages is done at the top and bottom of pages.

For now, from feedback from yourselves I am going back to the new search tool and am going to make it so that results can be displayed also as posts, rather then just the topic headings. This should make searching for a particular post easier.

I hope to have the new search fully finished by the end of this weekend as I don't think it should take more than 20 hours to implement and test.

Edited by -boRg- - 02 December 2005 at 12:17pm

A beta release of version 8 is still planned for the beginning of January, and progress on version 8 is still continuing.

As an updated, I spent most of Christmas Eve and Christmas day re-writing the file and image upload tool in Web Wiz Forums.

The new upload tool now places uploads into a 'temp' folder, they are then only moved to their final position when the post is posted and their file names placed into the database.

This allows for uploads to be associated with posts so that they can be removed when the post is deleted.

Any orphaned files left in the 'temp' folder can be deleted without fear of removing a file or image from a post. At the moment this will have to be done by FTP, but I plan on witting an online tool to do this.