In the past 39 days, we’ve been hard at work to bring you a better forum experience, and today, we think it’s beta-ready. The ModernBB 3.3 beta has arrived and it comes with some nice new and improved features, new styles, bugfixes and a lot more. We’ve also finished a nice little update for our website.
First of all: the ModernBB 3.3 beta can be downloaded from the index and download section on our website, like always. We recommend you to use this version for development and testing purpose only as this isn’t a stable release. ModernBB 3.3 Final will be available begin next month. A Release Candidate can be expected early next week.
Anyway, what does the new beta bring? Well, compared to the alpha release, I’m proud to announce the availability of Shy, Pinkie and Luna, 3 new styles that join the group of Random-styles. We’ve also finished our redesign of the Backstage style Aurora 5, which is now final. The Backstage has also been improved with some little features here and there: search results for users now have a hover effect and are striped to make it more clear what user you’re working with. The color of the Backstage can also be changed in your profile, where the “Backstage Style” feature was, we’ve replaced it with “Backstage Color”. Also, the editors that can use it, have been enhanced with the TinyMCE editor.
Futher on, names are now clickable in the board index and category view. Topics are styles better, idem dito for previews of new posts. We’ve improved the integration with TinyMCE, and so on. We’ve updated all of the included packages: Bootstrap, jQuery and TinyMCE all have been updated to their latest version, Bootstrap is currently the only unstable package in ModernBB, being version 3.2-dev. The most important change of all, might be the fact that the style engine has been redesigned completely. This includes the settings page (which is now a separate page) in the Backstage as well as the template and style system itselfs. This allows much more customization.
More information about the new features can be found at our changelog or the ModernBB 3.3 Shiplist.
Known issues in ModernBB 3.3 beta
- When reporting posts, they do not appear in the Backstage making it impossible to manage
- Videos can’t be added
- The TinyMCE editor adds multiple spaces under headings, through they are gone when posting the post
- Guests can’t post topics
Website update
We’ve also taken our time to update the website. Let me list them, note that some of the updates where already available, those are marked with a *.
- More colorfull headers through accents in the background*
- The footer now contains some stats about ModernBB*
- The documentation has been updated to miror ModernBB 3.3
- The documentation has been completed
- Changelog pages now contain a navigation bar to navigate between versions
- The FAQ has been updated
- Small style improvements