At the end of last year, I expressed that I wanted to make the integration of the community and thirty bees to be more fluid. Launching our new forum is the first step in to making that a reality. Not only is it easier to administrate, it is also a lot easier to build upon for the new features we are wanting to add in the future.
Our previous forum was built off of Nodebb, while it did have some nice features, it was very troublesome to maintain. Everything we tried to use for it was half developed, so this made it where we had to maintain some of the integrations ourselves, integrations that were standard in other platforms. It was also built on a stack that we were largely unfamiliar with, Node, Mongodb, and Solr. This only added to the frustrations with the forum.
The Migration
We migrated everything from the old forum, with one exception. We did not migrate the private messages from the old forum. We did not do this, because we had to migrate everything by hand. We had to write custom migration scripts, then check to see if everything was migrated correctly. If we migrated the private messages, we would have to had read some of them to make sure things migrated correctly. So we decided to just abandon them to the graveyard of the old platform, because like you, we value privacy.
Blogs
The blogs are one of my favorite features of the new forum. Last year when I started looking at the different forum choices, that was a feature I wanted in the core. So many good tips and tricks to using thirty bees get buried by having them as posts. With each user being able to have their own blogs, we can keep some of our great mods and tricks where they are easier seen. This should help new users who are trying to find information about how to modify their shops. You can view a quick tutorial on how to use the blogs here.
Another great way to use the blogs is to post information about modules you have created. This will allow people on our forums to discover your modules easier when you post content to our forum. You can write how to articles about your modules, tutorials, or other informative information and highlight it to the thirty bees community.
Coming Soon to the Forum
There were a couple of features we were working on that are not quite ready for prime time before the launch. But will be coming shortly to the forum. Some of those features are:
- Flair for Patrons and supporters of thirty bees
- Flair for partner agencies
- Feeds from our store to module sellers profiles
- Feature requests
We have a couple of other features in mind as well. We hope to use the new forum to better tie in the community and better educate our users.
Bugs
There could still be a few layout or other bugs left on the forum. If you notice any, please post them to this thread. We will get them handled as quickly as we can.
