- Joined
- Jun 13, 1999
- Messages
- 24,655
Greetings all,
With just a couple of months left in the 2012/13 season, I thought now would be a good time to let you know about some changes coming to the site this Summer.
The forum will be migrating away from vBulletin to the XenForo forum platform sometime in June. I have been planning this move for quite a while but put it on hold until the legal dispute between XenForo and vBulletin was resolved. XenForo recently won that legal battle so the switch is now definitely going through.
This will come as a big relief for me as the site has been stagnating on this version of vBulletin for years and any improvements / innovations I've wanted to introduce are so difficult that the site has pretty much hit a dead-end in terms of new features. XenForo will be a fresh new platform and I intend to build on it to improve the site further.
XenForo is a slick, modern forum system that will be a big improvement over the version of vBulletin that the site is currently running. I won't list the features here, you can visit their website to see it in action. Here are a few screengrabs from my local working copy. This is still a work in progress but will give you an idea of how things will look.
(click for larger version)
In terms of other new features, I'm working on a dedicated Match Day section to replace the existing Match Day forum so there is more to do before, during and after matches.
Features I'd like to have include:
This is obviously a big piece of work, with an initial release targeted for the 2013/14 pre-season. Only a sub-set of the above features are likely to be ready by then.
Obviously this is your community and your input on improvements / new features you would like to see on the site is very important. So please post your thoughts on the above and any other (serious) ideas you may have for ways we can improve the site.
Go....!
With just a couple of months left in the 2012/13 season, I thought now would be a good time to let you know about some changes coming to the site this Summer.
The forum will be migrating away from vBulletin to the XenForo forum platform sometime in June. I have been planning this move for quite a while but put it on hold until the legal dispute between XenForo and vBulletin was resolved. XenForo recently won that legal battle so the switch is now definitely going through.
This will come as a big relief for me as the site has been stagnating on this version of vBulletin for years and any improvements / innovations I've wanted to introduce are so difficult that the site has pretty much hit a dead-end in terms of new features. XenForo will be a fresh new platform and I intend to build on it to improve the site further.
XenForo is a slick, modern forum system that will be a big improvement over the version of vBulletin that the site is currently running. I won't list the features here, you can visit their website to see it in action. Here are a few screengrabs from my local working copy. This is still a work in progress but will give you an idea of how things will look.
(click for larger version)
In terms of other new features, I'm working on a dedicated Match Day section to replace the existing Match Day forum so there is more to do before, during and after matches.
Features I'd like to have include:
- real-time discussion during matches. NOT a chat room, but essentially a normal topic where new posts appear without refreshing
- post match player ratings with season leaderboards, stats, graphs etc
- post match Man of the Match voting with season leaderboards, stats, graphs etc
- Pre-match score predictions game with a league table of the most accurate users
- match previews articles (the ask the opposition slot which Solius is currently doing could be part of this)
- automated / interactive lineups game (currently run by Big-Red here).
- other cool features people come up with...
This is obviously a big piece of work, with an initial release targeted for the 2013/14 pre-season. Only a sub-set of the above features are likely to be ready by then.
Obviously this is your community and your input on improvements / new features you would like to see on the site is very important. So please post your thoughts on the above and any other (serious) ideas you may have for ways we can improve the site.
Go....!