So there I was, idling in the mybb irc channel happily minding my own business developing one of my not so secret, super secret projects when Chris suddenly becomes active and slaps us all in the face by teasing us about more 1.4 features.

<surfichris> new user management is going to be kick ass.

Oh it is, is it surfi? Does this mean I must drop everything and report on everything you’re about to say on mybbfans’ blog? I believe it does!

When asked what sort of changes he was making to the user management. More control for the admins, code revisions and optimisations or just cosmetic changes. He gleefully responded “all the above”! Maybe we will be seeing the sort of control that DennisTT’s Additional User Settings provides by default in mybb. Probably more as he went on to promise something totally unique, unseen in other modern forum packages.

As exciting as the above is, he didn’t stop there. He went on to tell us about some of the advanced search features in 1.4.

I ask you, what do you think of saved searches? Tell me in the comments.

Saved search, where you specify a search in your user cp and when you want to look through the results they are instantly available and up to date. Say for instance you want to keep up to date on the latest speculations on mybb 1.4 in the community forums. Well you would specify a new saved search for “mybb 1.4”. Then when you come back you will have an up to date list of all the threads and posts with “mybb 1.4”, no need to re-enter data into the search page. “So what?” I hear you say. You can go to the search page and re-enter the data to research with very little inconvenience. Its not exactly a revolutionary new feature. Well as the users might be able to use the results as an RSS feed to search your site for the bits they are interested in without even visiting your website, the main advantage is to the admin and not the users. The users would only have access to the threads and posts, as an admin you have access to all the information on your forum, information which is now search-able.

<surfichris> say you wanted had an IP address you wished to track
<surfichris> you could possibly create a view called “All users with 127.0.0.1″ as their IP.

So we can generate reports on our users activity. If all the search functions have been turned into a centralised class, there is practically nothing now which cannot be searched. He also announced that plugins and modifications can use the search features!

<surfichris> and say you wanted to implement this idea of “View” in a modification
<surfichris> you could possibly call it via build_x_view($view_properties)
<surfichris> so that way people could integrate it elsewhere

Wow, exciting stuff. MyBB 1.4 looks set to change the way we administer our forums for ever. Maybe phpbb version 4 will be up to par in a decades time.

- MiNT