Yes , it is final …. after so many addon Products by Invision Power , vBulletin now is coming out with its range of Official addon Products .  Quoting from vbulletin.com

Building on the plug-in architecture offered by vBulletin 3.6, the development team have been hard at work creating new products to widen the gamut of features available to sites running vBulletin.

The first of these new products are now entering the final phase of internal development and testing and will soon be unleashed. This initial batch of products consists of two applications, both of which attach to a new or existing vBulletin installation.

These products have been entirely developed by the core vBulletin development team, rather than being third-party scripts that have been bought-in and adapted, so customers can expect the same level of quality and support as they have become accustomed to with the main vBulletin Forum system.

In response to user requests we have been working on a blogging system that will fully integrate with vBulletin. vBulletin Blog (a working title) will allow sites running vBulletin to extend the functionality to allow forum users to maintain weblogs from their user control panel and leverages the extensive vBulletin permissions system to enable administrators to fine-tune the features available to their visitors.

During the development process for the new products, it became clear that it would be necessary to develop a means of managing each new product from conception to completion, and to keep track of progress on multiple projects in one central interface.
vBulletin Project Tools (also a working title) is the result of that development effort. We have been using the new tools internally for some time now and they have made significant improvements to the way we can keep tabs on how development is progressing. We intend to migrate our existing bug tracker to the new system next week, at which point everyone will be able to have a look around the system.

OK, we have now completed the matrix skin , for MW client. Here’s a preview of the skin , however this is a screenshot of a beta stage , do view the finished skin / vbulletin template in the Portfolio page . It was a pleasure working for John and his team / site. And i daresay they are also very much pleased by our work . His last reply , I quote,

Arindra, both me and my team have gone through the template and we are happy to say it is perfect !

Here is the screenshot .

OK , last few days has been a little slow again , thanks to political distrubances in our city / state . It is making everyone sick , how the idiots at the helm of our government along with its opposition continue to destroy the work culture / environment and everything that looks promising for us down here. Anyway, i will keep ranting about it , if allowed , so on to the main news.

We have sent John and his team of fraud watchers to approve and comment on our latest design sample for their vbulletin forum . Personally i believe it is yet just 25% made and hope we can do much more work on it , but lets wait for their feedback first .

On the other hand , we have almost completed a Invisionboard skin , for IP.Board 2.2 . I intend to distribute it for free since the topic / theme is pretty current and generic . The buttons are nice , with a full set of graphics, it should look much nicer . However , what i do like about it is the Stats section which we have modified . Sometime tomorow i will put up a screenshot here , but I do wish we had finished making it before the World Cup 2007 started .

Finally took the deciscion after some hunting around .  We have now purchased a subscription at Photos.com , which seems to be a good buy considering the amount of 139 USD . But time and browsing through its library will tell how good their stock of stock photographs really are.

First thing i did after taking the subscription is made it mandatory for all our designers to spend some amount of time each day to search in thephotos library and download as many images from there as time permits . The subscription mentions in its by-laws that photos should not be downloaded unless required , which i believe is bullshit. seriously , i paid for the service when there are several free sites which provide as good images, so why not use it . And anyway , we down here do not get as good broadband connectivity as  in many countries and i doubt our downloads would make any dent on their bandwith bills

Now on to jazzing up our sites ( secretly i wish there was such a site to download fonts per subscription , like this as well )

This is gonna be a quick blog . In the past 2-3 days , some good luck has brought in quite a few template design orders in a row. So the paypal pocket is a bit hefty now , which allows me to indulge . Now , when the paypal pocket is low , you find out so many things you wish you could take /subscribe to … and now when it is better , you always fall into indecisions .

The last time I had taken a stock photo site subscription, I believe it was from Indexstock , but IMO it was not a good collection of images , at least then . Lately I have often heard some of my colleagues / peers mention they use Photos.com or Corbis . So I am little unsure , which one will be the better value for money , hence I have laready posted in one of my favourite forums Sitepoint , and probably would also post in DP .

Stock images, as I have noticed, are sold in ifferent ways on different websites . Whereas in some sites , like GettyImages they allow simple download of all images without a obstrcutive watermarks , in sites like SXC.HU they put the watermark bang on the middle ; Getty has various secure measures in place INSIDE the image which allows them to track the usage of the image on the web, and as the current reports on the webgo , they actively pursue this and send invoices to those who violate their per image license . SXC on the other hand , grant the downloader full rights to use the image on any website in digital format , for single usage . They DO NOT charge for such usage , however they mention that such image should not be used in any print , should not be shared and resold , of course and also NOT used in any template sell , i.e mass circulation of the image for commercial gain.

Wordpress is another fantastic tool , which i guess is predominantly used by the world of webmasters. Some use it for SEO i.e web marketing and promotion, some use it as a CMS or Content Management Tool , some use it for the simplicity ( those who dont want to be bothered by building a website with HTML and all that crap ) , and some use it for the complexity – for taking it to another level by developing widgets and plugins and extending its usefullness …… and some use it as a Blog too ( if you can imagine that ) , lol . I started by using it as my Web Blog tool, in all honesty and have once used it as an alternative to building webpages , and currently intend to use it for pretty posting of Updates on this site and also hopefully some SEO .

However, with every Good comes the Bad , and it is no different with the case of Wordpress . Since , wordpress is soo goddamn famous and widely used , it is always a prey for evildoers and pranksters . Inside the Wordpress Admin Panel of any  WP installation, there is the famous “dashboard ” , which from time to time educates the world of bloggers on the cutting edge development news from the makers of WP . And my dashboard recently informed me that the download files of the Wordpress version 2.1.1 were compromised , and compromised in such a way , it makers me shiver on this warm summer night . acc. to the bulletin, i quote

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately. It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file.

As far as I remember , Wordpress was hosted by Yahoo! , and if the hackers could reach and modify inside Yahoo servers , that is a frightening news. Nevertheless , i have not and will not stop using Wordpress , there is simply too much goodness inside it . What i propose to do is what the developers of Wordpress have asked i.e. lookout for those who have not known of this news and continue to use the vulnerable version, and warn them . And furthermore , I would also like to get into skinning wordpress , maybe not today but soon .

On a sidenote , since i was talking of people extending wordpress , just a few minutes back, i installed a fantastic wordpress plugin , i.e  the Wordpress Sitemap Plugin developed by this wonderful fellow at http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final

Ever since i did some restructuring on the featuredhost website and its new pages, i have noticed a substantial gain in search engine rankings for the term vBulletin templates. Considering this as a heavily searched term, i was actually quite surprised to say the least for such an interesting gain in so little time. When i showed the same to our team, they were very enthusiastic about working on vBulletin and forum templating in general.

However the initial few days did not bring us any client but the forms / request a quote forms on the same pages got heavily attacked by Spam Bots. Even though we have a captcha solution, on some other forms, i decided against putting such a security measure on this in spite of receiving extensive spam , which gave us nothing but false hopes of receiving request for quotes.

But that was those days and today is now. In the past 2 days , we received 2 new queries for doing custom vB templates design. One such work has already been confirmed by the client and agreement already signed. From Monday , we start work for this German client, who was quite nice to chat with. Once again this requires working on another gaming site. We are only starting by doing a vB template but it promises to lead to more interesting vBulletin CMS development as well . Needless to say , i am pretty excited and geared up .

As for the other client, he has requested few testimonials , so am awaiting the confirmation from previous clients to know if they will allow us to use their testimonials . One client has already agreed and I am quite thankful to him . Hopefully by next week , we should have started work on both the new template designs.