Well as you can see I haven’t been blogging about MyBB much. In fact I haven’t been blogging that much at all, but that’s for a different blog entry.
I’ve been busy with school work and other stuff for the past several months, as I’m sure other people on the staff have been to. But nonetheless we are pushing forward with MyBB 1.4 at a steady pace.
We have seen Chris blog about the new built-in search-engine-optimized URLs. Although these “SEO” URLs are only present for pages with content that is “interesting” to search engine spiders (such as thread display, forum display, user profiles, announcements, and the calendar), they provide a much better “look” to the regular user than the standard ugly query string (for example, thread61881-5.html instead of showthread.php?tid=61881&page=5).
Then we have MyBB Merge (or is it MyBB Import, or MyMerge… ah well I don’t know exactly what name we have coined it today). This idea of having a centralized import/merge system has been an idea of Chris Boulton for at least one or two years, but we did not have the time to really develop it. But thanks to the work of Tikitiki (who is the lead of this project) users from a variety of other bulletin board systems can easily convert to MyBB. But you ask, why does the name have “Merge” and not “Convert”? Well because you can not only convert from another MyBB, but also merge the converted data to an existing MyBB forum if you wish. Imagine what you can do with this system: You can have an existing MyBB, and merge another forum (from SMF, phpBB, vBulletin, Invision Power Board, and others, or even MyBB itself) into it. Now how smart is that? Of course if you don’t have an existing MyBB, you can just convert your forum, since you have nothing to merge it with.
Recently we ported MyBB Merge so that it is compatible with MyBB 1.2, and at the time of writing it is under beta testing. Hopefully we can stamp out all the bugs so that we can release it to the general public. We’re expecting that the release of MyBB Merge will bring a whole new community to MyBB who would not have considered converting because of a variety of reasons (converter does not exist, converter is broken, etc).