What better way to kick off the portal forums then to get some feedback from the users about what they want to see in the portal. After all, it is made by UBB users, for UBB users. In this thread you may post your thoughts and ideas for features to be included in the UBB.portal.

I'll start it off by explaining what we have planned/done.

- News
- Polls
- Who's Online (PNTF)
- Calendar
- Reviews
- Styles Integration
- Latest/Most Active Topics
- Login

Please let us know if we are missing a feature that you would like to see included, and most importantly if you think you can help us creating some of these features contact TheX, Allen or I to join the Sourceforge team!

Here's my list:

-PM's
-Statistics of some sort. (Including latest member to join, top poster and top thread starter maybe)
-Search Box.

Thats all I can think of right now.

Please add:
-A list of the users, that were online during the last 24 hours.
-I think it you should be able to manage your whole site with it

How about a search option?

One that searches the forums you already have but how about a webcrawler of some kind.
You know like google. I dont have too much experience with things like that but if its too much trouble to code dont worry

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by Lord Dexter:
Here's my list:

-PM's
-Statistics of some sort. (Including latest member to join, top poster and top thread starter maybe)
-Search Box.

Thats all I can think of right now.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I like the stats and search box ideas....If stats isn't possible, then I'd like at least a "Our newest member is:" thing and a "Registered Members: *insert number here*" thing. Search box, would be self explenatory, as it's....well, just a search box.

~Jon

Something like the $RegisteredMemberLine from the UBB if you can't go too deep with Statistics. And maybe UBBNews interegated into it too.

how about reviews like post and php nuke?

*edit* oh yeah and banner support for when we have our sites sponsered *edit*

How about a Web Links option. So we can add a Yahoo type links section. This hopefully will be similur to PHPNukes version (Categories, sub-categories, sup-sub-categories, link checking, etc..)

Intergration of postnuke modules would be nice.

I'd like to see the recent visitors extended to cover the rest of the website as well.

If this is going to be database-driven, possibly a PHP Nuke -> UBB.Portal conversion script? I know it probably can't be done, but it's just a suggestion

Some excellent suggestions here. Keep them coming. I like the sounds of the search box, I will add it to the to do list.

How about personal links section.
Sort of like my style but each logged in user has the option to add their own links to the page so that if they do have the site as a front page like me they dont have to click on the adress bar and start typing they just select their links from the link section.

I like the search box as well... that one hasn't been mentioned much recently. A web-links addition would be nice as well... could be used as an affiliate-type-links section, a members link section, etc...

Comment on article (something like CNET/ZDNets)
Links (something like Gossamer Threads's)
Downloads
Frequently Asked Questions

i would definately like to see an image gallery. That would help my sites a lot!

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">Originally posted by TheX:
I'd like to see the recent visitors extended to cover the rest of the website as well.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">I'd love that too, if it's possible.

Why not use SourceForge for this?
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=442697&group_id=45372&func=browse

Make use of what ya got. Also somewhat more organized.

could you make the templates easily created and maybe even able to run off the ubb one so we dont have to re create our ubb templates?

My suggestions are

- Downloads ,with comments,official homepage and how many users downloaded the file until now

- History Database, where all the post news will be automatically saved in a database and the user could search them by month. ex July 2002, May 2000 etc

- A counter where it shows how many users are online in the site and in the forum. Also which has been the biggest number of users connected on the site the same time

Good luck with the project.It was something that UBB Community needed for a long time

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.

Perl and php are both cgi, both are equally good at being fast in the hands of a good developer or slow in the hands of a poor one. There's much more to it than the name of the language.

Yeah but output to SSI included files is even faster =), screw CGI and PHP hehe j/k.