Alright, so I’ve installed the IPB 3 Beta and I’ve played around with it for a bit and I think this it’s going to be an awesome forum software. The vast amount of features is outstanding. One of the features I am looking forward to is the API. With this feature hopefully I will be able to make any other Faintmedia website work with your Faintmedia account. I am also looking forward to the new Hook system. I already have a few ideas that I will be trying. The template editing area also looks outstanding some of the stuff is buggy right now but once it is sorted out it should be great. I’m also really liking the new announcement feature which allows you to post an announcement to specific forums or all forums. The expiry date is also a very handy thing to have as well. Another reason I like it is when it’s posted it isn’t actually posted in a forum, It has it’s own separate area.

Faintmedia’s forums will be getting changed up once the new version is released. We have a new forums skin designed so once it becomes a more stable version we will begin working on it. We also hope to do some changes to the main site to integrate them together better. One of the things is going to be the private message pop up. So if someone sends you a PM you will be able to access it from any page on the site. We will also be changing up the account area to fit more with the forums and it will be a lot easier to use. We will also be changing the account information area in the top right corner to fit with the forums better.

Finally, I have noticed lots of people on the development boards complaining about “oh it’s too slow” or “Why can’t we have the old skin?” seriously if you haven’t looked there are tons of these posts! For people that think it’s too slow they have to remember it is a beta and it is encoded. It is not yet optimized so please wait until it’s out of beta before complaining. I don’t understand why people are worried about the skin. I would have to say that most people are going to re-skin it and not use the default skin and even if you want the old 2.3.6 why not skin it yourself. Don’t know how to skin? Why not learn? Don’t want to skin? Well I’m sure that someone is going to come out with that skin so just be patient.

Well that’s all for now. Merry Christmas and have a Happy New Year!

The Layout Setup
We are currently in the planning stages of Venom right now but one of the things I have planned is a layout system which would work like so:

Say I wanted a generic header for each of my pages. So I make a page with all the information that would be the same in it. I would check a box that says that its just a layout file so that you can’t view that page from the browser itself. Now I would go into the pages that use that header and add some sort of template tag such as:

{layout.HEADER}

HEADER would be the name of the file. So now when I want to change something in the header it would change it on all the pages that have that tag at the top.

There will also be other variables you may use such as the title tag {general.TITLE} or something like that which would allow you to display the title of the page you are on in your header file.

Customize
I have big plans for the customization. If you are someone that enjoys modding scripts this will be easy for you. The backend will run off of XML files that will allow you to create what the button link for your mod says in the admin panel and what the side menu’s options are. It will also tell which PHP files are used for each page. So once you have the XML file setup you just need to code the PHP file’s that will run inside Venom and then it will display all that information when your in that area.

For example: Say I want a store running through PayPal but I don’t want to have a page for every product and I don’t want to do all the PHP in the layout file itself. You could create a customization. So you would have a new button in the admin panel that allows you to set everything up and that will save to the database. You will have a PHP file that tells how it should be displayed and what the variable is that is used to display it. So you would do everything in that part of the script and the only thing that will be in your actual store file would be something like {plugin.STORE} and that would display what you set it to.

I’m sorry for jumping all around with that description but I’m just trying to get out what I’m thinking about this part of the script. I will get a more detailed description out later on when we have started development. I think this feature will have lots of potential because you don’t need to use it for a store. You could use it for a blog or other things like that.

That’s all for now. I just thought I would give you a taste of what’s cooking on our labs.

After I fix this problem I’ll have to start working on the purchase system for Faintmedia then we can start selling it.

Future Features
I have a few ideas already about what I want to added to the script. I plan to add the ability to put videos on there and buy now buttons for people that want to sell their work.

Code Revamp!?
It will be a pain but worth it. Since I’ve created the Broken Framework I want to redo the script so that it uses the framework’s library of functions.  I want to do this for a few reasons. First it will be less cluttered. Second it will allow me to use the different features that framework has. Thirdly I will be able to work on some of the parts of the code that I think need it. This won’t happen for a while I’m just thinking ahead to what will need to be done.

Whats Left?
Well we need to finish beta testing the script. I still want to do some changes to the default skin to make it look nicer. That’s really all that needs to be done to the script itself. Then I need to figure out the price of the script, create the PayPal page and make it so that once I approve the PayPal submission you will be able to download it.

I am really excited for IPB 3.0 because of all the new stuff that will be introduced to it. I can’t wait to get my hands on it and start playing around.

Crawler
I have programed a crawler that allows you to crawl sites for its links, images, basic text, title and the metas. You are able to request the information and then do with it what you please. You can write it to a file or add it to a database. Also you can crawl a number of sites at once.

New MySQL Query Builder
I am currently in the process of building a new MySQL query builder. It uses arrays and keywords to set everything up for you and then runs the query. It will also come with a log file that you can enable in the setup so that if there is an error it won’t display it to the public but will add it to the error log file. It is easy to enable and disable you just have to use the setup function that looks like this:

$broken__db->setup(true);
(More setup options available.)

You use that in one of your files that will be included on all your pages so that it applies to all $broken__db functions.