I’m very happy to announce that YetAnotherForum.NET 1.9.4 RC2 is now online at Sueetie.com. I started playing with 1.9.4 since Beta 2, then Beta 3, then RC1. I was close to deploying several times but thought it best to wait. Now closing in on the release of Gummy Bear v1.3, when Jaben Cargman announced YAF 1.9.4 RC2 a week ago I stopped what I was doing and put upgrading YAF at the top of my Sueetie Essentials list.
There are several new features not found in YAF 1.9.3 like Buddies (Friends), a Thanks function and two features I bet you would never guess to find in a Community Forums: User Photo Albums and a Chat function. The potential in customization and extending individual user photo albums and a community chat function is huge. I can’t wait to dig in to see where we can take them.
One more important change in YAF 1.9.4 RC2 is that it is now a Web Application and no longer a Website Project. That’s very cool, particularly since I converted Sueetie into a Web Application only a few weeks ago as you know. It’s good to see my thinking confirmed by a developer the caliber of Jaben.
I’ve blogged a good bit about YetAnotherForum.NET 1.9.4 early on. One of the things I talked about was the substantially improved User Profile features. In prior versions of Gummy Bear I simply removed the links YAF Profile services, but no longer. There isn’t time for full integration in Gummy v1.3, but in the subsequent release I’m sure we’ll be seeing Sueetie Profile services merging with YetAnotherForum for a “Dashboard” type of offering, with messaging, albums, Friends, and more.
Okay, enough talk. Here are some screenshots of YAF 1.9.4 RC2 at Sueetie.com.
Here’s the new ShoutBox chat feature. As I said, I see so much potential for this on a business community site where a notification function is added for a client to contact customer support then launch a chat session. A bit more customization to make the conversation private, but you get the idea. Huge.
USER ALBUMS! So radical only upper-case will do. I enabled albums for all registered users at Sueetie.com, so if you’re thinking “Holy crap! User Albums??? I don’t believe it!” come around and upload some photos.
The YAF User Profile, only slightly reduced in functionality for things like User Avatar management, display name, time zone setting and other properties which the Sueetie User Profile currently handles. It’s difficult to see here, but on the left are YAF Messenger link for Inbox and other Personal Message functions. At bottom left are links to view your Thanks, Edit your Photo Albums, Signature and Subscriptions. Lots of room for additional Sueetie Community functions here. Very exciting!
Those familiar with Sueetie forums are going to notice two new features in the following screenshot. For starters, the stripped-down YAF BBCode editor has been replaced with the newest TinyMCE editor. I always liked TinyMCE a lot, and it’s great to be using it with YAF. Secondly, we’re doing smileys now. I’m so happy with my YetAnotherForum experience I finally enabled the Smileys option. I’ve never been a big Smiley kind of guy, but hey, let’s ALL smile. We’re happy YAF 1.9.4 RC2 users!
