With the new site and the speration in layers with the Forum, I am strongly considering yet another radical change to how things currently operate.
At the moment we have all have a site wide profile, which works for the forums and every other part of the site. This is fine and works well.
However with the new site we will be moving to some newer technologies which includes a forum system that is separate to the site itself, this will result in a faster site and a faster forum, especially since the forum software we will be using (SMF) is faster than e107 (our current framework) itself, the bulk of the site being our news and our forum posts, it will be good to move these two systems apart.
There is however a "Gotcha" in this, being that there is no current full integration between the user systems of the forum and the site itself.
What this means is that I am strongly considering having separate user systems rather than trying to couple them together. Further meaning that you will have an account for the website and a separate account for the forums, two logins.
This all in all is not a big deal and there will be opportunities to integrate them fully further down the road, at this stage i want to see it proven before we jump on board in an RC or Beta release (it is Alpha at the moment which means first, feature, incomplete release)
This is going to be good for some and bad for others.
Firstly, if you currently have a forum account then you don't need to do a thing and don't need to worry, if the forum is all you use. Your account will exist already in the new forums.
What I won't be doing, is transferring your current existing accounts from the forums to the new site.
This further means, that if you would like to participate in the Tipping comp, post news or articles, or get involved in any of our other interactive site level activities, you will need to register a second time on the site itself.
For 90% of the users on the site, this should not be a problem as you either use 1 or the other, for the rest well it is a slight issue, but hopefully not massive
Whether you have an account on the site or not, you will still be able to view the news and articles and see everything on the site, so it all depends on your level of involvement and future involvement.
Though with all this said and done, there is still a chance that before the site release a stable integration will become available and all the above will be a moot point.
A further note is also that the new site (not the forum) has a limitation where your usernames must be at least 4 characters long for security reasons.
Please comment and let me know whether this is too much of a headache for you or your thoughts and opinions.
Dan
At the moment we have all have a site wide profile, which works for the forums and every other part of the site. This is fine and works well.
However with the new site we will be moving to some newer technologies which includes a forum system that is separate to the site itself, this will result in a faster site and a faster forum, especially since the forum software we will be using (SMF) is faster than e107 (our current framework) itself, the bulk of the site being our news and our forum posts, it will be good to move these two systems apart.
There is however a "Gotcha" in this, being that there is no current full integration between the user systems of the forum and the site itself.
What this means is that I am strongly considering having separate user systems rather than trying to couple them together. Further meaning that you will have an account for the website and a separate account for the forums, two logins.
This all in all is not a big deal and there will be opportunities to integrate them fully further down the road, at this stage i want to see it proven before we jump on board in an RC or Beta release (it is Alpha at the moment which means first, feature, incomplete release)
This is going to be good for some and bad for others.
Firstly, if you currently have a forum account then you don't need to do a thing and don't need to worry, if the forum is all you use. Your account will exist already in the new forums.
What I won't be doing, is transferring your current existing accounts from the forums to the new site.
This further means, that if you would like to participate in the Tipping comp, post news or articles, or get involved in any of our other interactive site level activities, you will need to register a second time on the site itself.
For 90% of the users on the site, this should not be a problem as you either use 1 or the other, for the rest well it is a slight issue, but hopefully not massive
Whether you have an account on the site or not, you will still be able to view the news and articles and see everything on the site, so it all depends on your level of involvement and future involvement.
Though with all this said and done, there is still a chance that before the site release a stable integration will become available and all the above will be a moot point.
A further note is also that the new site (not the forum) has a limitation where your usernames must be at least 4 characters long for security reasons.
Please comment and let me know whether this is too much of a headache for you or your thoughts and opinions.
Dan