In case you haven't noticed, we have upgraded our forums to the latest version of SMF. To many of you, this means a few colour tweaks and cool new features. But for me, it is much more than that.
When we first switched to SMF from our old phpBB forums, I began learning PHP in order to modify our forums -
very slightly - to add things like 'posting absence' and such. I gradually learnt more PHP and added more features, but as you might imagine, modifying the forums with very little knowledge of how things worked led to inconsistent and inefficient coding - aka a mess.
Even worse, all the modifications that were made pretty much bound us to SMF v1.1.1, because if we upgraded even one version, we would have lost all of those, or it would have been quite difficult to upgrade.
Ever since shifting to the 'personnel system', I have been striving to make it independent of the forums, and simply work
with the forums. But there were certain things, like the calendar, that I never thought I'd get around to. Well, I'm pleased to say that I have, and as you can see, I've made all of our custom features independent of the forums. The only custom bits on the forums are things required for forum functions (i.e. avatars, announcements, etc.).
Overall, things are far more efficient now, and we can upgrade much easier in the future. The forums should run a lot faster, as I've also decreased their size from 3,821mb to 197mb (I know..wow), and now I only pull custom 29th records where necessary in the forums.
I'm sure you'll run into bugs. SMF changed plenty of variable names, so I'm sure there are a few 'typos' in our system as a result. Please report these bugs
here and I'll fix them as soon as I can.
Enjoy the new features and all the stuff 'under the hood'
