What is AtomBB? It's a new free forum software which.. You have probably heard other software uttering these lines.. Hopes to revolutionise the stagnant forum market. As I've said in one of my biggest announcements however.. It's not all about you. One of my biggest motivations is creating a forum software which I can use. It's not all about me either. It's about everyone.
I'm not just trying to make a statement on the forum market. I'm making a forum software which solves problems which have been getting in my way for years. For more information, read my "mission statement": http://atombb.com/thread.php?tid=42
What makes us different from these other software which hope to revolutionise the forum market? Unlike many of them, we aren't revolutionising it by "stripping features out" with the whole "less is more" philosophy which I find to be silly. Instead, we hope to abstract the complexity away from the user rather than, making the software itself simple. Also, we're pushing new features while trying to not compromise on the features which you expect from a forum software.
What features do we have? Good question. I've heard this one before, particularly when someone asked how we're "better" than phpBB. There are several features which we have which the competition doesn't:
Alpha Two: http://atombb.com/thread.php?tid=30 Some new information about the upcoming alpha release.
And remember, we are currently in alpha so, there's alot more to come.
Feedback is greatly appreciated.
I'm not just trying to make a statement on the forum market. I'm making a forum software which solves problems which have been getting in my way for years. For more information, read my "mission statement": http://atombb.com/thread.php?tid=42
What makes us different from these other software which hope to revolutionise the forum market? Unlike many of them, we aren't revolutionising it by "stripping features out" with the whole "less is more" philosophy which I find to be silly. Instead, we hope to abstract the complexity away from the user rather than, making the software itself simple. Also, we're pushing new features while trying to not compromise on the features which you expect from a forum software.
What features do we have? Good question. I've heard this one before, particularly when someone asked how we're "better" than phpBB. There are several features which we have which the competition doesn't:
- A powerful template system: While phpBB / vBulletin have features like conditional statements in the templates, MyBB doesn't to my knowledge. Additionally, you can do nice stuff within the templates like {include("header")} to load the header template and to render it at that specific point. Template Hooks exist to make it less likely for templates to break between releases.
- A powerful permissions system: I have less experiance with phpBB's permissions system, however it doesn't seem as granular as MyBB's so, I'll be comparing AtomBB to MyBB here. Firstly, unlike MyBB.. We support permissions everywhere, even in the ModCP (MyBB doesn't have permissions for the ModCP) and we generally have more granular permissions across the board than, MyBB.
- Solid Custom Framework: AtomBB is powered by my Hadron Framework, which covers permissions, plugins, database abstraction, etc. This framework is evolving to adapt to AtomBB's needs.
- Speed: I've been keeping AtomBB fairly lightweight and I still have many tricks up my sleeve to squeeze a ton more performance out during Alpha 3. The main optimisation phase hasn't even begun yet.
- Permission Presets: We have bundled commonly used permissions on forums as presets. For instance, you can hit Staff Only or Everyone or Registered Users only on the drop-down or you can get your hands dirty customising the individual permissions. Feedback would be nice.
- Staff Levels: With my powerful staff levels system, you can stop lower level staff with editing the higher level staff.
- Common Next Gen Features: We have the common next generation features which are popping up in many other forum software like mentions, conversation systems instead of PMs, etc.
- Widgets: We have a widgets system (called Gadgets in the software) which allows you to place widgets in the sidebars (depending on the theme, there could be more than one) / header / footer like the forum statistics or who's online (these were moved into widgets to make things more flexible than adding them directly to the index).
- Responsive Design: While it hasn't been heavily tested, the AtomBB theme should be a decent responsive design. Feedback would be appreciated, if you run into any issues with it.
- Third Party Integration: We currently support integration with MediaWiki via a plugin (don't worry, you'll see a wiki going up sooner or later so, you'll get to see it in action) and Wordpress Integration is one of the features which will be done soon.
- Additional Improvements: We have drop-down loading which is a nice AJAX way to quickly load the last x topics in a forum without having to enter the forum itself, looking for feedback on this.
Another nice little feature is Quick Topics where the new topic form will appear above the topiclist when you hit the button which was inspired by Steam. This falls back to the usual behaviour when JavaScript is disabled. The ability to reorder forums by dragging them around in the Control Panel.
Relative Time system is enabled by default, a feature which has existed for a very long time in the paid space but, has never shown up in the free space until, very very recently.
Alpha Two: http://atombb.com/thread.php?tid=30 Some new information about the upcoming alpha release.
And remember, we are currently in alpha so, there's alot more to come.
Feedback is greatly appreciated.
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I'm looking forward to the release of AtomBB.
