SMF 2.0 Beta 1 announced

[RTK]

Dear Charter Members,

Simple Machines is proud to announce the release of the first beta of SMF 2.0 — the next major release of SMF.

SMF 2.0 represents a major change to the core operation of SMF and we must stress that this release is a beta release — and the first beta at that. Whilst we've spent considerable time testing the software (It powers the community forums here) there is bound to be bugs included within the release and as such we strongly urge you not to run it on a production forum at this time. While we will do our best to provide support for the new release we cannot promise the same level of support offered for our stable releases and certainly accept no responsibility for any loss or damage incurred testing this product!

As a Charter Member you are one of the few privileged users to have access to this software — please do not redistribute this package — it is against the license and at the very least will result in the revocation of your Charter Membership here.

The package contains everything you need to either complete a new installation or upgrade an existing one — from YaBBSE 1.5.5 all the way up to SMF 1.1.3. While the upgrade tool has changed with SMF 2.0 it is hopefully easy to understand and the Online Manual has a lot of information to assist you with this process.

Before talking about the new features of SMF 2.0, there are some very important caveats you should read and understand before even considering an upgrade or installation of this beta software:
Multi-database support, while operational in general, is not complete. The repair boards feature currently only works with MySQL and upgrade scripts have not been written for anything except MySQL at present. As such please do not start a production forum in PostgreSQL or SQLite until such time as support has been completed.
Modifications for SMF 1.1 and earlier are not very likely to work until their authors have an opportunity to rewrite them. Changes to the core have been vast and likelihood of compatibility is poor at best.
[/b]The upgrader will do its best to upgrade previous themes. However, this is far from fool proof and you are likely to need to tweak old themes and update them to take full advantage of SMF 2.0 functionality. Note that theme authors are unlikely to have access to 2.0 so it may take some time before released themes are updated. That said, if during the upgrade your current themes are not flawlessly updated please report a bug as we want to make this as simple as possible.
Language packs for 1.1 will be out of date and need considerable quantities of new translations.
Listed below is a small selection of some of the more important features added and functionality that has changed:
Database abstraction — with support for PostgreSQL and SQLite planned alongside that of MySQL.
Automatic installation of packages into themes other than just the default.
Email templates to simplify customization of forum emails.
Moderation center including post, topic and attachment moderation — to allow approving of user content before it is made public.
User warning system.
Additional group functionally including group moderators and requestable/free assignable groups.
WYSIWYG editor to provide an intuitive user interface to those users not familiar with BBC.
Permission improvements such as group inheritance and permission profiles to further reduce the complexity of the permissions system.
File based caching for a performance increase on all forums regardless of whether an accelerator is installed.
Mail queuing system to stagger the sending of emails to improve performance on large forums.
Advanced signature settings to allow the administrator of a forum to more tightly control the contents of users signatures.
Personal messaging improvements including ability to automatically sort incoming messages and a variety of display options.
Improved upgrade script with better timeout protection and simpler user interface.
Custom profile fields to enable administrators to add additional member fields from the administration center.
Open ID support - to enable single login across a range of sites.
Improved SSI functionality for better site integration.
That said there is still more to come. Over the coming months we intend to continue to develop the SMF core as well as develop the HTML output produced by our software to make it more semantical. To aid in reporting bugs and getting support on SMF 2.0 we've created a board just for this purpose — please report all bug and support issues there as opposed to the public boards or the helpdesk. We're also very keen to hear your feedback, good and bad, to help us continue to improve the software.

http://www.simplemachines.org/download.php

Thank you,
Simple Machines

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You can view the full announcement by following this link:
http://www.simplemachines.org/commun...topic=190943.0

Regards,
The Simple Machines Community Forum Team.

[Availor]

Personaly, I'm waiting for websitebaker 3 to be announced. They say they are building it from scratch with many new features. I'm curious.

[gidgit]

Looks very promising Risto

Hey Av... yea, the field is wide open for cms development these days... the quest to content management Nirvana...

[Availor]

Hey Av... yea, the field is wide open for cms development these days... the quest to content management Nirvana...

I totally replaced anything I've done before with cms - it's like everything you've ever thought of - someone else has already done it for you, and for free! If you want to build a portal it would take you several months. Instead you can just install something in several minutes, replace a theme and just customize it in a few hours and you have a whole new website for your liking.

[RTK]

... it's like everything you've ever thought of - someone else has already done it for you, and for free!

As for WP - had I discovered/started using it years ago, I would have gotten so much more done. It's almost frightening how much code is available for free. Can't see myself ever "designing" another website again.

However, learning to tweak the little things to get things right, is something I will have to look at a bit closer. Can't rely on kind people like Lonnie and haakoo to help me with every single and silly coding question. However, I'm much further than I was a couple of months ago.

Using pages (instead of posts), and a static front page, and people would never see it as a "blog". With WP I can restructure and tweek thousands of web pages in a matter of minutes - and there's no uploading of individual pages. If I had the stones to search and replace in the db - I would take over the world! Ok, maybe not... But the efficiency is just crazy.

I do try to donate to the people that make all this goodness available for free. Clean archive, polls and SMF are my main donations.

Risto

[Availor]

As for WP - had I discovered/started using it years ago, I would have gotten so much more done. It's almost frightening how much code is available for free. Can't see myself ever "designing" another website again.

However, learning to tweak the little things to get things right, is something I will have to look at a bit closer. Can't rely on kind people like Lonnie and haakoo to help me with every single and silly coding question. However, I'm much further than I was a couple of months ago.

Using pages (instead of posts), and a static front page, and people would never see it as a "blog". With WP I can restructure and tweek thousands of web pages in a matter of minutes - and there's no uploading of individual pages. If I had the stones to search and replace in the db - I would take over the world! Ok, maybe not... But the efficiency is just crazy.

I do try to donate to the people that make all this goodness available for free. Clean archive, polls and SMF are my main donations.

Risto

Risto, you must know what you're doing because somehow you'll have to customize it all. Moreover, you'll need to find out code you need. It will take time but yes, when you discover the power of opensource cms you'll be reluctant of going back to designing anything by yourself.

[gidgit]

I don't know about that... The way we display the information is design in it's self, chalk full of design strategies to get the best out of each level of display... The where when and why sort of thing... it's all design of sort eh...

Further, how to create fresh and interesting content is also part of good design, including artistic design of the literary sort

And it's all so wide open... that's so cool

[RedWombat]

Looks interesting!

I'm a Coldfusion person. I ended up developing my own cms using Coldfusion and FCKEditor. I found most cms apps way over the top complicated for the end user. I'm going to check into this though.

Risto, is there a demo to view the interface on the front-end as well as the admin side?

[RTK]

Red,

You can view and test most aspects of the board here: support.simplemachines.org/demo/index.php

User name: test --- Password: test

It's not the latest release, but it will look pretty much the same.

Risto