1. Achieved milestones.
RC6 is our most exciting release yet, and we achieved a few significant milestones.
- We passed SVN commit #1000 during the development of RC6.
- We upgraded all our code from GPLv2 to GPLv3 licensing, just like Nooku and Anahita did last month.
- Early last week we patched Nooku Framework for Joomla! 1.6 compatibility, and the patch got accepted!
- The following weekend we got Ninjaboard installable on Joomla! 1.6 without losing 1.5 compatability.
With milestones covered, I'm gonna focus on 2 other topics today to keep things brief and to the point.
2. What's new in RC6.
There's far too much to say about RC6 to squeeze it into a single blog post.
But you can see them all by spending a few minutes of your valueable time and
right now and see what all the fuzz is about.
For those of you like me prefer to learn about the juicy bits first, read on!
The most sensational news about RC6 are of course that it now supports Joomla! 1.6*, without dropping 1.5 support.
We've largely renovated our install script ground up.
We've made it smarter by no longer running database schema upgrades during install, but rather the first time you visit Ninjaboard after installing.
We're using AJAX to not only prevent script timeout errors, but mainly to make the installer report exactly what it's doing, when it's doing it.
So far the feedback we've received reports that by being able to see what's happening under the hood, the install feels much faster and less of a pain.
Proper Email Notifications!
We studied how people wanted to subscribe to them, and we managed to squeeze it down to 3 common ways.
- By topic, standard in all forum apps.
- By category, fairly common and also critical for moderators.
- By person, uncommon in forum apps but extremely common in social apps. So most people expects that feature to be there.
And while we implemented all 3, each email notification carries an link to where you can organize whatever you're subscribed to, or what we call "watches".
We're also planning on allowing you to reply directly to a post by simply replying to a notification email.
And just a closing note; Admins can control wether to include post text or not. And email notifications are translatable.
With that said, we've fixed more bugs than in any previous release. Making RC6 effectively the most stable and production ready release we've done so far.
But our main focus have been making Ninjaboard radically better performing, more out of the box and less in your way than ever before.
3. Ninjaboard around the web.
For concluding our brief post about exciting new release, I want to share a few of the exciting things happening around the web related to Ninjaboard.
Yireo blogging about their decision to migrate to Ninjaboard.
Ninjaboard featured and running on the RocketTheme September 2010 template, Omnicron.
Ninjaboard featured and running on the RocketTheme October 2010 template, Syndicate.
For the October issue of Joomla! Magazine I got the opportunity to talk about what makes Ninjaboard stand out from the rest.
And while you're there don't forget to checkout the awesome new November issue!
JoomStew with me super excited to be their guest. Talking about Ninjaboard on 1.6, Nooku FW and a lots of other fun stuff!
*There's a known issue related to the different acl architechture in 1.6. Calling RC6 for "Preview" at this point is our way of calling it Beta.
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