The
new release of miniBB provides a stable functional core inherited from the previous release, plus some new options and improvements.
The most important and heavy is that now admin and forum moderators are
able to update user's profiles, clicking on the link from the public profile page. That way it will be possible to act for the staff person like he would be the user himself; and that way, it will be possible to update custom values of user's profile, like Avatars, Signature, Gender, Pictures and possibly others. Corresponding add-ons are upgraded as well. By this we eliminate support of the "
Editing profiles" add-on.
Important programming issue is that now $isMod variable is defined at the top level, and could be referrenced at any other place or add-on.
$useSessions setting and support is eliminated in this version: as our experience showed, if the site is using sessions and it it's necessary to set up the sessions-based login routine, it is better to implement modifying bb_cookie.php.
Other changes listed in
Updating History package, include small-to-average non-critical bugfixes. Please follow the instructions included in
!UPDATE.txt file. If your board is not overcustomized, the upgrade process could be very quick this time.
Update is highly recommended to everybody because it's not just simply the new release; in the future, any kind of profile-based add-on we would program, will support only this version. The same affects any add-on with moderator privileges.
The following add-ons and solutions were upgraded as well:
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Signatures - now works completely based on 2.1 profile add-ons algorithm. It is now possible to set up BB codes in Signatures which differ from default forum BB codes; thus they will be saved in database and not parsed on-the-fly which could dramatically speed up the whole load of the software. The add-on has been sponsored by Work-At-Home-Forum, so far the best successful community of all the home and freelance workers around the world; the community is based on miniBB of course ;-)
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Avatars - the add-on has been updated to support admin and moderators in uploading user's avatars when editing his/her profile. As I know many of you have requested this feature, so here we go.
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Gender solution - the same as Signatures, this solution is now based on the new miniBB 2.1 routine with user profile custom add-ons and provides the basic example of how the custom drop-down field could be easily implemented. Admin and moderators are able to edit such fields with no pain now.
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Photo Album add-on - this premium add-on was upgraded regarding profile editing as well. Earlier Admin and/or Moderator were able to use special links on the public user info page to remove or edit the pictures. Now it all is available under user's profile form.
- The
solution of how to add new profile's field was upgraded as well the codes provided. I hope the current algorithm of miniBB will be secured enough to allow super level of customizing of any kind of additional user's profile field. Basically with the new method it is meant that there is no field or field type which could not be added.
All mentioned stuff is installed and configured now on our
minibbtest server. Feel free to test and report here any kind of bugs or issues you may find.
As always we thank you all for the mutual, knowledge-based and financial support :-)
