Hi All:
So here's some news and updates.
I'll be purchasing the new vBulletin 4.0 publishing suite on Friday. The product is on pre-sale right now, so it will be a while before it gets rolled out to the site. There's going to be a lot of changes, so I plan on doing a lot of testing before it's made live.
What can you expect?
Well, the forums are going to look different. The default skin in vB4 is (I think) a lot cleaner than the one we're currently using. So forums are going to end up looking something like this but will be colored using the green/tan/orange color scheme we've been using forever.
The front page is going to change. Since the new software includes a CMS (Content Management System), we're going to migrate from our current CMS (Drupal) over to vB's. This will provide much tighter integration into your forum accounts. Posting comments on front page articles is a gigantic kludge right now, but it will be much cleaner when all of this software comes from the same source.
We've gone though several different pieces of software over the years: phpNuke, Mambo, Joomla, Wordpress, and now Drupal. Hopefully this will be the last software change for a long, long time.
NJPB Live Maps will live on as a separate entity than the rest of the site (as it was hand coded by myself and my friend Devin), so you won't see any big changes there. I'll be adding more maps as they become available from the State.
There's the possibility of more features showing up on the site, specifically the capability for you to blog here. You can get an idea of how the blogs will work by looking at the vB Demo site. I'd welcome feedback from folks if this is something they'd be interested in or not, and whether or not we should limit the content in the blogs to solely Pine Barrens related posts.
Finally, I expect that the Image Gallery will change software (again), hopefully to something much more user friendly, because I hate the software we're using now. I'm still in a wait-and-see position to see what software gets released for vB4.
I have a feeling that we'll be looking at the site being upgraded around the end of the year. I'm also really excited about what 2010 has in store. I've been kicking around ideas for some more get-togethers, and knock on wood I'll be in a position to do a bit more writing.
I also would like to ask that if you have any suggestions on how to make the site better, or any functionality you'd like to see, send me a PM or email.
Finally, I'd like to formally thank each and every one of you who come to this site and share your Pine Barrens stories and photos. This site is the largest and most active Pine Barrens site on the internet, and it's because of YOU that it is that way. Here's to many more years of fun!
So here's some news and updates.
I'll be purchasing the new vBulletin 4.0 publishing suite on Friday. The product is on pre-sale right now, so it will be a while before it gets rolled out to the site. There's going to be a lot of changes, so I plan on doing a lot of testing before it's made live.
What can you expect?
Well, the forums are going to look different. The default skin in vB4 is (I think) a lot cleaner than the one we're currently using. So forums are going to end up looking something like this but will be colored using the green/tan/orange color scheme we've been using forever.
The front page is going to change. Since the new software includes a CMS (Content Management System), we're going to migrate from our current CMS (Drupal) over to vB's. This will provide much tighter integration into your forum accounts. Posting comments on front page articles is a gigantic kludge right now, but it will be much cleaner when all of this software comes from the same source.
We've gone though several different pieces of software over the years: phpNuke, Mambo, Joomla, Wordpress, and now Drupal. Hopefully this will be the last software change for a long, long time.
NJPB Live Maps will live on as a separate entity than the rest of the site (as it was hand coded by myself and my friend Devin), so you won't see any big changes there. I'll be adding more maps as they become available from the State.
There's the possibility of more features showing up on the site, specifically the capability for you to blog here. You can get an idea of how the blogs will work by looking at the vB Demo site. I'd welcome feedback from folks if this is something they'd be interested in or not, and whether or not we should limit the content in the blogs to solely Pine Barrens related posts.
Finally, I expect that the Image Gallery will change software (again), hopefully to something much more user friendly, because I hate the software we're using now. I'm still in a wait-and-see position to see what software gets released for vB4.
I have a feeling that we'll be looking at the site being upgraded around the end of the year. I'm also really excited about what 2010 has in store. I've been kicking around ideas for some more get-togethers, and knock on wood I'll be in a position to do a bit more writing.
I also would like to ask that if you have any suggestions on how to make the site better, or any functionality you'd like to see, send me a PM or email.
Finally, I'd like to formally thank each and every one of you who come to this site and share your Pine Barrens stories and photos. This site is the largest and most active Pine Barrens site on the internet, and it's because of YOU that it is that way. Here's to many more years of fun!
Thanks for your time doing all this.
