Yesterday support member Ryan Ashbrook left the MyBB team. An official announcement is yet to be made on the community forums. I will however note that in a conversation I had with him on MSN this morning he said he is still going to participate in MyBB and MyBB Fans, and that he has no intention of leaving his friends at MyBB. He also said he will continue to support the various plugins he has released for MyBB in the foreseeable future.
Well thanks Ryan, you have been a fantastic support member. I wish you luck with your future endeavours .
Author Archive for
Ryan Ashbrook leaves the support team.
Published by November 20th, 2007 in MyBB Community. 2 CommentsSo there I was, idling in the mybb irc channel happily minding my own business developing one of my not so secret, super secret projects when Chris suddenly becomes active and slaps us all in the face by teasing us about more 1.4 features.
<surfichris> new user management is going to be kick ass.
Oh it is, is it surfi? Does this mean I must drop everything and report on everything you’re about to say on mybbfans’ blog? I believe it does!
When asked what sort of changes he was making to the user management. More control for the admins, code revisions and optimisations or just cosmetic changes. He gleefully responded “all the above”! Maybe we will be seeing the sort of control that DennisTT’s Additional User Settings provides by default in mybb. Probably more as he went on to promise something totally unique, unseen in other modern forum packages.
As exciting as the above is, he didn’t stop there. He went on to tell us about some of the advanced search features in 1.4.
I ask you, what do you think of saved searches? Tell me in the comments.
Saved search, where you specify a search in your user cp and when you want to look through the results they are instantly available and up to date. Say for instance you want to keep up to date on the latest speculations on mybb 1.4 in the community forums. Well you would specify a new saved search for “mybb 1.4”. Then when you come back you will have an up to date list of all the threads and posts with “mybb 1.4”, no need to re-enter data into the search page. “So what?” I hear you say. You can go to the search page and re-enter the data to research with very little inconvenience. Its not exactly a revolutionary new feature. Well as the users might be able to use the results as an RSS feed to search your site for the bits they are interested in without even visiting your website, the main advantage is to the admin and not the users. The users would only have access to the threads and posts, as an admin you have access to all the information on your forum, information which is now search-able.
<surfichris> say you wanted had an IP address you wished to track
<surfichris> you could possibly create a view called “All users with 127.0.0.1″ as their IP.
So we can generate reports on our users activity. If all the search functions have been turned into a centralised class, there is practically nothing now which cannot be searched. He also announced that plugins and modifications can use the search features!
<surfichris> and say you wanted to implement this idea of “View” in a modification
<surfichris> you could possibly call it via build_x_view($view_properties)
<surfichris> so that way people could integrate it elsewhere
Wow, exciting stuff. MyBB 1.4 looks set to change the way we administer our forums for ever. Maybe phpbb version 4 will be up to par in a decades time.
- MiNT
Tikitiki has released details about some of the back end features relating to the database. Mybb 1.4 will support databases other than the typical MySQL database. If your forum is particularly large then you will be happy to know that features have been implemented to make your forum take the pressure of your ever growing userbase.
Some of the available staff positions have been filled by community members destroyer, DrPoodle, MrDoom and last but not least rh1n0.
Just because some new staff members have been added to the team now doesn’t mean your chance of being a staff member have gone. Remember Dev positions are available too and the above four members are support members, so anyone who applied for a Dev position is in with a good chance. Also Chris has said that positions are still available in his announcement and in the IRC channel.
As to who has already been picked for a position on the dev team, we can only speculate.
One of the developers of MyBB has recently hinted at the existence of a feature known as the tasking system. The exact post (which can be found here) says that in MyBB 1.4, sessions will be cleared out of the database on a regular bases via the tasking system. That’s all very well and good, no one wants there forum being slowed down because of an overly bloated database, but what other uses could this tasking system be put to and in the end what use is it to you, the end user? Although we do not have the exact details of this system to show you, with the help of Tikitiki answering some of my questions, we have conjectured up some possible uses and functionality of this system.
Besides the lower level stuff that MyBB itself needs to schedule to keep itself up and running in top condition there is also the possibility the user could give commands to it and have the command execute at a specified time. A little like a cron job. What capabilities would this provide? You could for example make a command that would check for all threads that haven’t had any replies for six or so weeks and then move them into an archive forum. You could then set this to run once at the end of each day or if your forum isn’t very active you could run it once a week.
Plugins might also be able to use the system. Some plugins require total words to be added up to achieve there overall function (be that generating in depth statistics or awarding poodle points). The problem with this is it can take a vast amount of time to recount every word in every post and to force MyBB to do it every time a page is requested is just unacceptable and would lead to monstrous loading times for the user. The simple solution would be to put the recounting command into the task system and let it occur once every day/week automatically.
Of course one limit of PHP is that it requires someone to visit the website and request the pages with a browser before any code will run. This is fine, as if a task is over due to run when a user visits the task will simply run before any content is fed to the user. This will appear as though the task has run on schedule and the user will be none the wiser. However some tasks like the previous example can take an age to complete. To burden this on a user is unacceptable and a better method must be used. Luckily the tasking system will be able to be tied into a cron job on your server. Upon questioning Tikitiki, he said if an external cronjob is run, it would…
call on task.php?tid=x and it will detect it and run it
The cron job will call up task.php and pass via an argument which task to run. Then the PHP takes over and as if a user had triggered it the task executes and the next time a user visits they see the changes.
For all the security freaks out there, Tikitiki also mentioned…
users can’t call on it via a browser and expect it to run without it being within the time frame
You cant expect tasks to run if you call the php page yourself in a browser. It has to be the correct time at which the task is expected to run. If the page is called then simply nothing will happen, cutting down on potential security risks. You make be thinking that any disgruntled users still have a slight window of opportunity as to get the task to do something its not supposed to. If the user can find out the task number and find out when a task is supposed to run then you could potentially have a broken forum on your hands! Not so, Tiki said it better than I can phrase it so once again…
(users) can’t bypass faking it as a cron job because it’ll only work if called via CLI on a cron job.
In conclusion the tasking system looks like it will prove to be an exciting addition to MyBB for both forum admins and plugin developers. Personally I can’t wait to get a hold of source code and see the true extent of what it is capable of. For further information on this feature and other exciting MyBB 1.4 news check back at MyBB Fans for updates. That’s just about everything I have to say about this at the moment except I’ll just mention that this blog post has a lot more fact to it than my last one 
See you for now, MiNT
World Exclusive - MyBB 1.4 - Leaked ACP screenshot!
Published by June 7th, 2007 in MyBB 1.4.x. 11 CommentsI could hardly believe it when one of the MyBB staff members approached me with a one off opportunity to have a look at the previously unseen by mortal eyes MyBB 1.4 Admin CP. The staff member (who would like to remain anonymous) said they could contain themselves no longer and had to show someone. I feel it is my prerogative as a loyal community member to share this with the rest of you. Before I give you the link I would like to discuss what can be seen in the screen shot.
First of all, as previously announced, the Admin CP has been completely redesigned. The new simple UI allows the user to see all of the options at a glance without cutting down on the elegance and intuition you would want from any interface. Any operation can be executed through a singe click of the button. The UI appears to be ergonomic, meaning you will find the most commonly used options where your cursor naturally glides. Once again increasing the speed and accuracy that you can administer your board.
There have already been announced to be two themes and I’m not sure what the other will look like. This theme is a light gray colour. Surprisingly this otherwise bland colour has been used in such a way as to not distract you at the task at hand (which would usually be administering your forum). These changes come at a price, it is such a dramatic change from the old user interface that you will need to spend a little time getting used to it, however in the long run you will come to appreciate its elegance and simplicity and eventually come around to respecting its almost magical allure.
No features in the above paragraphs have been confirmed.
Now without further ado…
The New MyBB 1.4 Admin CP
Another contest in the works!
Published by April 12th, 2007 in MyBB Fans and MyBB Community. 0 CommentsThat’s right. Once again MyBBFans.com gives you the opportunity to take our hard earned cash! (well, DrPoodle’s money anyway.) We’re trying to find the best themers the community has to offer, and expand the amount of available themes for use by the community. All you will have to do is create a new theme and submit it to MyBB Fans. Further details will be announced as they become known. So start making your themes now and submit them when we let you 
Good luck!
- MiNT
Sponsored by DrPoodle.com, Plotting the Moon’s demise since 2007!
MyBB, as in your bb. Not our bb as in the developers bb, not your bb as in our bb.
Not our bb, not their bb, not this or that or Bill’s bb.
MyBB, say that a couple of times. It’s yours, do with it what you will.
Oh and by the way, MyBBFans.com lets you post your own blog posts about MyBB on this blog You can do so by clicking “Blog CP” on the welcome bar at the top, and writing a new post. We will assume that all posts are ready to be published unless you indicate in your draft that the post is still “under construction”
PS. Dennis has been nagging me for a while about blogging this. Now that it actually is blogged, Dennis you can call off those hit men now.
MyBB translator tmhai has set up a new service which allows novices to MyBB easily get a forum setup on their website.
Basically, if you trust them you give them your server credentials and they will install a copy of MyBB on the web space. I would recommend this service to any novice who feels intimidated by the installer. Hopefully this will increase the install base of MyBB by some noticeable degree.
Latest Blog Comments