ModernBB 3.2 “Mellow” now available

Yesterday, we released the ModernBB 3.2 beta, well… I’m pleased to announce, the availablitiy of ModernBB 3.2!  Between ModernBB 3.2 beta and 3.2.0, we’ve fixed a couple of additional issues. It’s recommended to upgrade, of course. But be sure to have a backup of your data. What’s new in ModernBB 3.2, you ask?

• Front-end, reimagend: ModernBB 3.2 contains a brand new front-end! The profile? New. The forum view? New. The help page? New. The user list? New. The only thing that didn’t change is the topic view, as it was already revamped in ModernBB 3.1. The new interface is ment to be more content focussed and will give you and your forum users a brand new and awesome experience.
• First run: First run is a brand new feature in ModernBB 3.2. It will show a nice message on top of your forums index page that welcomes new users and gives links to common first run tasks, like uploading an avatar, user settings, etc. When you upgrade, your current users will get to see this message too. Guests also see this message, for them, it’s permanent, unless you disable this feature for guests in the settings in the Backstage.
• A Magic and Happy family of Awesome Random styles that are Radical updated to give a Kind look: in other words: we gave Randomness, Awesomeness, Radicalness and Kindness an updated look and renamed them to Random, Awesom, Radical and Kind. Why the rename? Because 2 new styles joined in: Magic and Happy. Through we have a word like Happy with -ness (happieness), we don’t have one for Magic, so here it is. I think you will like our new styles.
• Posted: When an user post in a topic, and this feature is enabled in the Backstage, a “Posted” label will appear in front of the topic.
• More help is better help: since the introduction of the WYSIWYG editor in ModernBB 3.0 (which will be updated in 3.3), the help page became kind of useless (more useless then it already was). So, we updated it with shiny new content.
• Redirections without waiting: When you, or your users, are redirected, no matter where they are (Backstage or front-end), you won’t see any redirect screen anymore.
• Login: This is important for forums that are very old (PunBB 1.2 and prior), because users that ever since didn’t log in, won’t be able to login anymore. We’ve removed some legacy code that allowed very old accounts to log in. We don’t expect this to be a problem, as those users probably wouldn’t return anyway (unless you’re still running PunBB 1.2, but then again, you can’t update to ModernBB 3.2, you’ll first have to update to something higher then FluxBB 1.5 and lower then ModernBB 3.0).
• Language files: We’ve checked our language files and removed all lines we didn’t use anymore, or everything that was double (and that’s a lot, we removed 20% of the files content). Translators will get it much easier to translate ModernBB now, and I’m planning to do so. People in Belgium and the Netherlands can look forward to a Dutch translation of ModernBB in the near future. I’ll also start up an account for ModernBB at a service to translate it in more languages. Something else we did with language files is that they now contain default settings for date and time notation.
• General code base cleanup: the language files where part of our code base cleanup, just like the profile, login and our default styles, did we remove a lot of useless code. Over 1400 lines of code have been removed.
• Bugfixes, bugfixes and even more bugfixes.

ModernBB 3.2 is the result of 3 weeks of hard work, with a total of 142 commits and some great help from other people. That “great help from other people” will become even more clear with ModernBB 3.3. Because Oldhobbyist, our newest addition to the develop team, is working to separate the logic from the content in the ModernBB Core. Style creators can expect an aweful lot of nice new things in ModernBB 3.3. For plugin creators, some new stuff is coming to with those changes. For fans of the Backstage: this is our main next focus point of ModernBB 3.3, you will get to see a brand new design. And we will do some serious improvements to the UX. Stay tuned!