1. live news feeds you could config per page.

say you have a gaming section on your ubb.portal, it would be cool if you could log into your admin cp and insert xml news feeds from around the net. heres a example.

click here i would LOVE to see this in the portal.

also a weather feed would be nice. a hack for vBulletin and a mod for postnuke have been made with this, its a VERY nice feture for users

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by Brad.loo:
1. live news feeds you could config per page.

say you have a gaming section on your ubb.portal, it would be cool if you could log into your admin cp and insert xml news feeds from around the net. heres a example.

click here i would LOVE to see this in the portal.

also a weather feed would be nice. a hack for vBulletin and a mod for postnuke have been made with this, its a VERY nice feture for users</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Now that would be ultra cool!

I don't know if this is mentioned before, but as postnuke users know the permissions system in PN is terrible. This could be done better in this project. The permissions can be given to groups and/or individuals in PN and it would be great if this will be in the ubb portal.

What Brad said about the news feed would be great to have on it.

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but in the VBPortal, they have news which has a different picture and title for each section it comes from.
IE For news about forum announcements, it has a title of 'FORUM ANNOUNCMENTS' and a pic of a forum,
For news on Sci Fi, it has title of 'SCI FI NEWS' and a picture of the Enterprise.
You get me?
If not, I can get an example.

Planet Plastica had one of the UBB's that got me hooked on template hacking.

I understand Hank, and that aint a bad idea either.

Another possible idea is something like the Authority List.
It shows all the staff in a little box or on another page.

I don't know if this has already been said :

-Memberlist
-Search feature for news
-Chatroom, maybe?

How about integrating a picture upload into the users profile, not a general upload feature, just for this one specific area to minimise security implications. Automatically tie the pic to the users profile, limit the size, only allow jpg & gif, and hopefully tie it into a members list.

The list of official features mean that the Portal will be an awesome product when it is finished.

Regards

Websorceror

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by Telekinesis:
-Chatroom, maybe?</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Expanding on that, something like the Chat Mod showing who's in the ChatRoom.

And an option to have a chat room or not! My server wont allow chat rooms.

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by Hank:
And an option to have a chat room or not! My server wont allow chat rooms. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">The portal will have to be flexible in that regard. If we want it to be usable by nearly everyone then these things will have to be optional.

There is something you need to keep in mind while making feature requests. Anything that requires modifying the UBB source code can't be easily done - the portal is going to be designed to just "plug in" to the existing files & scripts.

Ahh so It's just going to be an upload and set thing? Ahh that may ruin some ideas...:/

Or we could just request two UBB.portals, one that is a plugin, or one that requires modifying the UBB.classic code. Of course, starting out, I'd go with the first.

~Jon

I'm sure that once the portal is released in beta that the UBB haxxors will start modifying the code. Having the Portal software conform to certain standards means that it will usable by anybody with a valid (licensed) UBB without modification.

Not everybody is into hacking their UBB's to bits. It sounds strange even hearing myself say that.

You need to talk to piracy@infopop.com if you have an issue

I agree with all of the suggestions above (last few pages), yet I do have one reservation / concern.. Processor usage.

The advantage of systems that use PHP is that they're both static and dynamic and much more efficient, Perl/CGI simply isn't. In other words you wouldn't really want the output to be as dynamic as say the forums themselves – too much CPU usage on larger sites.

As an example, most separate news systems (NewsPro etc.) store the data in static files, updating whenever a new item is changed. Yet the files that are actually called are either .txt or SHTML (via SSI), thus massively saving on CPU time by not having to run a CGI each time the page loads.

Running CGIs may seem like small peas to some of you, but even a small script can cause some serious load on a site getting 6,000+/- visitors per day (main page). You need to be clever and look for ways to have the data update at set periods (excluding news, which updates when you add a post) rather than all load when the page is loaded. This could turn 6,000 daily instances into say 24 (update per hour) or 48 (guess = 30mins =]) and yet still appear just as dynamic to the end user and ultimately save resources.

I like the UBB Latest Threads hack for this same reason, you can output to an HTML rather than call the CGI directly. The HTML can be made to update when somebody adds a new post only and thus not have to load dynamically each time a visitor loads the front page (not forum page - the main external HTML page).

Anyway that’s just my idea.. crazy eh =).

That is a huge concern of course. That's one of the reasons that the site my UBB is on is still built with .shtml and .txt files for the most part. I am experimenting with a lot of .php in my other sites but since I'm glued to flat files with UBB I not going to put the effort into Netwerkin to change over at this time.

I guess we need to see the first beta code when it's available to see how this is going to work. Your suggestions are great, and I hope they're listened to. I'll give you information just as soon as I have it.