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 .

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.

A few days back, InvisionPower came up with their latest update releasing InvisionBoard version 2.2.2 and components ( i.e. including IP.Blog , IP.Blog and Converge and downloads ). As expected , it was not a major upgrade but a bugfixing release mostly for the Forums / board and Blog. The main upgrade was already released with IP.Board 2.2 which was a major overhaul from 2.1.7 . But for me, in one of my main IP.Board forums i.e on DiscussTV.com which I had not upgraded since long , more specifically from 2.1.2 , this was quite a severe change. Mostly for the good , i accept as with a forum like DiscussTV , the features sets, such as IPB FRIENDS , is quite a good thing to have. The brand new personal profile which shows things like profile comments, buddies, user ratings and so much more is the very in thing , ala MySpace, Orkut etc.

The attachment class has totally been re-written with this new version and the old forum contacts have given way to the friends feature. Also , after several fiascos ( if i may call it that), …. during the 2.1.4 – 2.1.7 time , Invision came up with some major security features, which includes a full fledged security centre in the Admin Panel of IPB.

Tonight recieved a new order , this time to design a vbulletin template for a gaming site. I think i am going to like designing / templating for this website. As a child , i was always into playing PC Games . Our new customer , owns / operates more than one gaming forum and somewhere along talking about the work, we dwelved into the genres of games each of us likes or rather liked . I have an idea that the client might be younger than me , and it was quite funny when he asked how old i am

Nevertheless , it is a perfectly valid question , as i am still kept hanging by an outsourced programmer who has been delaying for quite a long time on one invisionboard module i had got from him.

During tonights chat , the client mentioned that his idea of a gaming forum skin compares to IGN.com . Now , anyone running a gaming forum , obviously looks up to IGN – be it for the popularity , the look and feel or the functionability. However what they forget often , i believe is that IGN doesnt use any particular forum software but is built upon totally custom coded scripts from what i know . So often it is and will be much more flexible and maleable .

For many months , i have always wanted to do what we are doing now, i.e designing templates and skins. Over all these times earlier, i have come across various alternative sites… some of them having very good customisations and some having a good amount of skins. Since we are still at the beginning, i doubt if our works can yet be called good customizations, and also since our workforce is as of yet limited, we don’t have a good number of templates / skins either.

However , i am also having the dilemma … what to aim for , quantity and quality ? We have just started to sell … so i don’t have a good enough understanding which will help in selling more and thus making better money . As i have seen, as of yet making just CSS or colour changes can be done pretty quickly , but integrating designs differently does take a bit of time . I think , for now i will go and hunt for more inspirations …. not just design wise , but also from the business point of view.

It’s been quite a few days that i have kept up to date with the happenings at Invisionpower website or Invisionize and IPS Beyond. Just now i was reading the official invision blog , where they had posted i noticed that with the release of IP.Board 2.2.1 and the Blog , Gallery and Download latest version, they are now going to concentrate more on developing Ipsbeyond website, more as a website.

Now that IP.Board 2.2.0 is out and being well-received we are going to turn our focus to IPS Beyond. If you are not familiar with IPS Beyond already it is our official customer resource site.

At IPS Beyond customers can enjoy an informal atmosphere in which they can receive customer-to-customer technical support, chat about the products, share tips and tricks, and more. There are also modifications available for download to extend the feature set of your boards.

Now since i have been spending quite some time with vBulletin and its customisation lately , i know it as a fact that much of its vBulletin’s popularity is simply because of vB.org , where any vBulletin customer can find almost all kinds of modification and help related to vbulletin , that is near officially checked and warrantied by the vB team . The site is constantly updated and developed to make the end user experience extremely easy and helpful .  The proper categorisation , the voting system , indication of what kind of level of expertise , supported or not , wether it requires code modification etc makes choosing a modification or design implemetation a job of snaping fingers . Much of this has been possible simply by harnessing the skill and mass interaction of vb customers .

I am sure the IPS management understood this , and felt that they should be doing simmilar in order to make providing support less of a strenous work  and at the same time gain the popularity at the same time , allowing the users of IP.Board belong to .

Since we are now working quite round the (office) clock on vBulletin customisations, we are spending much time in gatherin vBulletin documentation from wherever possible. Being one of the most premier and oldest forum software , it is quite evident that it has good documetation available from the official site i.e vbulletin.com . Not only there is exhaustive documentation on the installation , configuration , rights and permissions but also there is nice info about making customisations to the default script .

I have personally been an long time license holder of Invisionboard and hence always had access to the official documentation and GDK there , but i am even more impressed with the one at vbulletin.com . And also apart from the official documentations , the non official Tips and Tricks and info available on the external sites like vb.org , vb-faqs etc are not bad either , to say the least .  And apart from this , i have also had a peek in the book on vBulletin from Packt ( even though it is a little old dated , by version wise) , it is quite a good read.