Happy Thanksgiving 2008 to everyone from Jcink.com

Have a great holiday!

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A new forum was added today called JFB Development News. You can read the rules and information topic to see what it's all about.

This is the replacement for the development "blog" we had months ago which did not work out, and the old mess of a "development journal" topic with nearly 200 pages worth of scattered posts. The blog was overly complicated to post news and get feedback, as well as inactive, but provided a much cleaner environment. The dev. journal was alive and well, but it was an absolute disaster having it all mushed together and I stopped being able to keep track of the suggestions, constant questions, and posts.

The new section here should provide the perfect balance between the two that we need. I can also open multiple threads for separate ongoing projects and get feedback, which makes it really easy to keep track of all around.

I've sliced up the old mod suggestion topic and populated it with all the past feature development(s) for your viewing purposes, and there's two new topics there as well with things I'll likely be starting on soon.

Thoughts? Comments? Let us know.

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Today we've added two new customization features to JFB. First off, you can now change post icons, the announcement macro, and the collapse/expand macro via your ACP. For more information on the macros, please see here. This is great to take advantage of for all skins, and perhaps to make custom post icons for the upcoming holiday season(s) if you wish.

In addition, we've also introduced a more advanced feature to the board wrappers system. It's called: wrapper variables. Coders and administrators will want to take a look at the new things you can do with the board wrappers. See here for more information. Please read it carefully to understand all the options and let us know if you have any questions.

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As of today, several changes have happened to the boards and site. The main one being that Resourceempire.com, the former official resource site for JFB has been closed, and the support has been moved back to here, the Jcink.com main support forums.

So in basic, JFB Support is now here: http://forum.jcink.com/index.php?c=11

The first thing you'll notice is that after the community area, is that the support section for JFB is now front-end and not lumped in with the rest. I think this is a good idea to display this section out in the open on its own. It will create less confusion and it'll be easier to access. JFB is obviously the most popular service on Jcink.com right now; so I think giving it a category of its own isn't a bad idea. I've also done the exact same thing with PHP-Quick-Arcade, which is another program I offer here being second most-popular in my mind, and always needs support. As for the rest of the services, I kept them lumped all in one section again. Air-Proxy, NightFire IRC, And AskMrComputer, are great services which are doing fine, and I'm not slagging them off by not giving them their own whole sections, but in general, they are clearly not high-support needed areas where they NEED it. So, they will do just fine there. (There isn't too much to using a proxy site or an IRC Chat server anyway). It does make the board a bit longer than you are all used to though, however, I'm open to feedback on it.

The homepage was also changed today, particularly the blog/news. Instead of using wordpress for site news, I've gone back to syndicating the general announcements/news section here. All of the dates say Oct 31st because I mass imported all the old announcements from the blog. I'll fix the dates soon. The seperation was annoying and not to mention I still kept battling blog spam comments. I think I'll get better feedback and more notice if I do everything via the forums instead. But, I did like the whole blog style layout for the main site news; and I kept that. It's just that everything runs off this board again, and to comment, you'll need an account here instead of having to make an entire seperate one on the blog. This is easier for me to have it all in one place. You can sort our news by date, and even search through it. In addition, as far as development news, I'm going back to my old style forum-topic journal type set up, which I may syndicate to the site as well in blog form. Once again, I feel like I get more feedback and notice if everything is done via the forums.

If you are interested in reading further about this decision to do this, please read the text below. It is long, so I have separated it from the main news post.

If you had existing support topics unsolved, please repost them here. I'll get right to it.

-Jcink

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