Well it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Most of what I would have posted here has gone to our official MyBB Blog. So unfortunately I haven’t really had much to post. Since we’re not giving a release date, it makes sense to fill you in as much as possible instead.
So for the last two weeks I’ve been working on the last and final ACP page; The Themes page. It’s going to be pretty cool and a lot simpler than MyBB 1.2’s. I’ll post an overview of the Themes & Templates section once I’m done with the Themes page on the Official MyBB Blog.
The theme’s page will still take a considerable amount of work to finish. Most of the front end is complete, but behind-the-scences things like when you save a theme still needs to be programmed or finished.
Why is it taking so long? First and foremost, the Theme’s system is extremely complex. More complex then something I’ve ever dealt with. The system was originally designed by Chris Boulton (Lead MyBB Manager & Programmer) and was planned to be finished by Chris, but his time has been taken up by many other things so it was handed off to me. While I can code the mockups created gererously by Chris B. and Justin S., the logic that goes on behind the scences isn’t something you can just pick up on and code in quickly. As I stated before, it’s extremely complex to do correctly.
So because of that Chris and I have been in constant communication about how x and y works. The only problem is our communication is limited to the weekends because of time constrains (And living half across the world from each other doesn’t exactly help either). Even then, the weekends can become busy with other priorities.
To sum this all up, we’re trying to wrap up MyBB 1.4 as soon as we can.
Nevertheless, we’ve had an awesome turn out for the public beta and over 400 bugs have been squashed since the beginning of beta testing. I have to definately thank everyone who has participated for contributing their feedback and findings for MyBB 1.4. Hopefully, 1.4 will turn out to be an awesome product.
For the past 4 weeks I’ve been busy working on MyBB 1.4 and the upcoming Merge System as regular, but in addition to having to create a 4 minute video on the “Reign of Terror” with Robespierre for World History. I did this with two other friends. Seeing as most of this was done by me (most of the scripts, and the movie editing) I’ve uploaded it here for you to view:
As for MyBB, we’re continuing to pace forward. The target for the release of the Merge System RC1 (phpBB 2 & MyBB Converters) should be within the next few weeks. At this point I can’t say much more than that. The information flow will probably start to pick up soon.
I was getting up from the couch when it started on Oct 31 at 03:04:54 UTC; Incidentally all 4 members of my family were in the room so we and our dog crammed ourselves in the door to the computer room/guest room. I’d say the largest thing moving was us – Those Gordons!
For most of the teenagers in California this was their first large earthquake. The experience itself was a little freaky. First came small tremors then it rolled and everything shook violently for a few seconds, the house creaked some, and a few seconds later it subsided and got out the flashlight in case the aftershocks proved themselves worthy of knocking out a few underground transformers. We took a minute to collect ourselves. The phone lines were overloaded at the moment and after a few tries we got through to family members. Everyone was just a little shaken up except my Great Grandmother (who’s doing fine! in case your wondering, even at 92) who lived in a Mobile home and things weren’t exactly laid out the best. Some portraits fell and cracked. Lamps, books, a bookshelf that wasn’t bolted to the desk and one of those old CRT clunky monitors fell. Fortunately it worked and everyone was fine after an hour and a half of clean-up.
The USGS site (United States Geology Service – http://usgs.gov/ ) has some nifty map services with earthquake data overlayed; Here’s a USGS image depicting the earthquakes within the last week:
The big yellow square was the big 5.6 and the smaller square right in the middle of the larger yellow square was a 3.7 aftershock just about an hour ago from the time of this post (5 PM Pacific Time)
Recently I found myself updating my modifications / plugins to the GNU/GPL License. I’ve been asking myself why? And I think the answer to that is because it’s such a good way to share your experience, knowledge, and insight with the rest of the world and at the same time breeding a new generation of programmers through useful examples. I always knew there was a bigger part of me that just wanted to help people. What better way to do it than through the “most free” license out there?
After a month and a half long donation drive and 2 weeks of waiting, ordering, and waiting, it is finally here. The new NCAAbbs Server (Actually two if you want to get technical) will fix our load issues with massive crowds and bring stability to the server for several years.
(Each image links to a ultra hi-res image)
And here’s a breakdown of the costs for the new server:
We’ll be upgrading to a 4U Rack at our datacenter (They’re all out of 2U’s) and setup one of the servers to “master” and the other two to “slaves” with replication technologies. I’ll also be back porting some MyBB 1.4 code for this special occasion (The master/slave technologies)
If everything goes well this should be up within the next few weeks; If you want to stay updated check out the NCAAbbs forum here: http://www.ncaabbs.com – Updates will be in the “Lounge -> Sports Bar Main” forum.
Feel free to ask questions below and I’ll be happy to answer.
Warning: The following tutorial is for MyBB forums only. Instructions for other forum software may vary.
I’ve recently been noticing large forums coming to MyBB. One for example is http://www.talkvideogames.com/ with nearly half a million posts, taking up position #2 in place of MsgPlus. So I decided it’s time for a tutorial on how to ensure your server is running fast with MyBB:
1) Change the mybb_sessions table to a HEAP (or MEMORY) type. This will ensure that the table is stored in memory. It won’t cause problems because it’ll be truncated often (sessions 24 hours or older are trimmed at random)
2) Make sure your kernel, mysql, php, and all extensions are up-to-date.
3) Install Zend, eAccelerator, and or memcache extensions for php. MyBB 1.4 will take advantage of eAccelerator / memcache. Installing APC (Advanced PHP Cache) is usually worth it too.
4) Turn on the MySQL Query Cache if it isn’t on already.
5) Remove PHP extensions that you don’t use – you can always turn them on later if need be.
6) Optimize your tables weekly using a cron job of some sort
Just a note; MyBB 1.4 will continue to provide continual speed improvements for you and your forum. Things like the new task system will allow you to manage your forum better and more easily.
I’ve just finished coding (Well, Chris wrote the base of the code) a new feature in. MyBB 1.4 will now feature MySQL & PostgreSQL slave drivers. (Yes We’ve added PostrgreSQL and SQLite 2 & 3 support for MyBB 1.4). This will come for a great boost in speed on large forums that run on multiple servers (think if MyBB ever ran Gaia Online).
Using a MySQL/PgSQL slave driver allows us to separate SELECT queries from queries that modify the database (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE etc). Allowing that will let each server be tuned to select or modifying to get the maximum performance out of each server and over all have a speed increase on the servers.
Not to mention we’ll be the first free forum software (afaik) to do it. In addition to this, we’ve made many other optimizations to MyBB 1.4 and we are continuing to do so. We just hope this continues to show how dedicated we are towards making you a product that is fast, free, and efficient!
For those of you know don’t know, I’m taking a vacation. I’ll be up at Tahoe for a week. I’ll post pictures if my camera doesn’t screw up again (like last time )
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