[UseBB-Development] UseBB in 2009

[Dietrich M. <die...@us...>]

People have started expressing their concerns about UseBB, especialy
version 2 or lack thereof. As written previously, UseBB 2 development
has been in an inactive state for a large period of time.

Since the first inception of the project in October 2003, quite a lot
has changed on the web and in my personal life, work and interests.
The project started as a small experiment and PHP practice and took a
long time to get to the first stable release (1.0.0). Since then ideas
have existed to write a second version of the forum, solving the many
issues and mistakes made in the period I wrote UseBB 1 as a teenager.

Nowadays, I'm nearly 22, completed college and going to university to
complete a bridging programme and gain a Master's degree in Computer
Science. Next to this, I have got a few new hobbies and not to forget
a beautiful girlfriend. Prgramming in my free time has been at a very
low level during the previous years. The Last.fm Simple Stats module
for Drupal has been taken over and its development is now continued
thanks to a few people, though UseBB has mostly remained a single
person project and thus inactive during the past years.

While my free time is quite limited nowadays and my interest in PHP
went down, I still have the idea to complete UseBB 2 in PHP, but can
not give any date when this will be the case. It is certainly true to
state that at this day there are dozens different free forum packages
offering the same. And while UseBB 2 was planned with a different
feature set and possibilities, plans might change to adapt UseBB
better to what the web has become today, with YouTube and Facebook in
many people's daily life, and what people expect from today's web
applications.

The future after UseBB 2 is uncertain and depends on what interest it
will gain with the current and future users and developers. Quite
likely, if it depends on me, UseBB 3 (if any) will not be written in
PHP and thus will leave behind more than seven years of PHP
development experience to develop a new package in a different
programming language, taking the existing project (or a new one,
eventually) out of the PHP forum package forest.

So, what about UseBB for now? UseBB 1 is still there and 1.0.10 will
be released later on. UseBB 2 is in an alpha state and the development
will be picked up again, maybe next summer. UseBB 1 cannot give the
right solution to all forum software questions nowadays and as of this
day should be considered legacy software.

-- 
Dietrich Moerman
UseBB founder and developer