cixzBB - A quick briefing
Today I will give a short briefing on cixzBB. At this time we are still in early development but we have our idea planned out and written down. All that is left is hammering down the code and designing the theme. A peace of cake!
cixzBB is a Bulletinboard. It could be used for several things, such as creating communities, keeping in touch with friends and a base of operations when working on some project of yours. cixzBB will be developed in the same way that the Bulletin Board System has evolved over time. We will take care to see where history has led us and release one stable release for each of these steps as we further develop the software we will focus on maintaining a strong and stable core.
The first step we are going for is the one that came after the old school “News Groups”. It was a simple guest book system which let you post one topic which other people could reply to.
It looked something like this.
- Post #1
– 1st level Reply
— 2nd level Reply
- Post #2
– 1st level Reply
This simple guest book system is still used in several ways, mostly in comment systems for blogs and news posts but also on other communities in the form of Wall posts on Facebook or simply guest book on myspace.
Before we started out with this project we looked into our competition, we tried out vBB, phpBB and Invision Power Board which are the main players on the market. Both vBB and IPB are licensed for a fairly large sum of money. I believe it ranged from about $100 to $400 depending on which packet you chose. phpBB is the only free forum on the web that are able to compete with the larger players and still it feels like they lack a lot of functions.
cixzBB will, in time, compete with these forums and are planning out to release the entire project for free (This might change at a later date).
When we looked into our competition it also occured to us that the functionality that they are lacking are quite easy to remedy. Such as Cross Browser compatibility and strictly validate code. We will also optimize the forums to be able to handle a large amount of visitors/members and be on the fore front of forum security.
To meet these goals we will be opening up a public community for this project as soon as we have reached our second stage. This will be when we are starting to add graphical layout to cixzBB and our first stable release arrive.
cixzBB will be developed in PHP for MySQL. The entire site will be validated in a XHTML 1.0 Strict and, as far as we can, only use XHTML/CSS for client side languages, so no Javascript. We do this so that we wont lose any functionality when different client side scripts are disabled.
At this time we have had quite a smooth ride, the problems we have had was easily tackled by carefully planning out ahead and looking at where potential problems might occur. One of these problems was the first database structure that we wanted to use.
It turned out that we forgot one of the basics when working out the SQL for the DB. So by redoing it and putting it all down on paper before we start coding we have managed to keep away from trouble at several places.
Personally I have learned a lot so far when it comes to planning. I usually just throw myself into a new project without planning it out. I get this great idea of how i want it to be when finished but with no clue on how to get there. With this project I have grown up some more and develop the cixzBB first in my mind, then on paper and not until I got a fair idea on how to reach my goal did I start coding.
This will be all for today. I will be setting up a developers board in a while where you can all register to keep up with the people behind the cixzBB. We will be answering questions, taking in suggestions and recruiting for the community.
Hope to see you there when that arrives!
– Martin
Good day readers.