Once more… I really want to say sorry for all the inconveniences that I’ve caused in these 3 days but I’ve been working 9 hours a day ONLY on this website to make it better and take your user experience to the next level.

You’ll probably have noticed that I’ve changed again the forum platform, I had to do this because BB Press was just too simple, too minimalistic and sending private messages was not as straightforward as I’d liked to. In addition to this, there were several things that were not working correctly and after spending hours trying to fix them I gave up and went looking for something else.

The new forum is powered by Mingle Forum and it works incredibly well so far, I really encourage you guys to try it out and see if everything is ok.

There’s a beta version of it that looks even better than this but there are no skins for it and therefore it doesn’t blend well with our wordpress theme. I’ll be waiting for it to be released (or for skins to come out) and then we’ll upgrade.

New features to look out for:

• Upper right, next to your user name: there’s a small thing that will notify you about stuff that happens in the website, so you can immediately see if there’s something new from your last visit (testing needed).
• Improved profiles: now you can make a better profile, with more stuff and use an avatar without registering to the Gravatar service. Those who already have a Gravatar won’t need to change anything.
  Due to this change, people will have to partially redo their profile.
• Private Messages: yes, they are here, they are INSIDE the forums and are well implemented in the system: now you can directly message a user and/or compose a new message from scracth.

I still need to “clean” the forum and put back all the stickies, close the threads were people are not supposed to write in, etc… I’ll make some of these today and the rest tomorrow.

I hope no posts got lost during the various migration (the last one from bbPress to MingleForum was extremely painful, I had to inject manually the threads and posts via SQL queries): if you see a post you made missing, I deeply apologize for this and I kindly ask you to post again the content.

aaaand…. that’s all folks!
Again… I encourage you trying these new features out and report in the forums if everything works for you.

I’ll see you next week with a new release!