Since no one seems to have noticed, or at least mentioned it today, I’ll go ahead and call attention to it. I know that a lot of you are probably just coming directly to the forums since the home page (www.latechbbb.com) has been pretty stagnant for quite a while now. To tell you the truth, the only thing that changed were the RSS feed links on the top of the page and the weather.
Well all that has changed now and you will probably want to take a look back at our homepage. This morning, I activated a new portal system called vBadvanced. This portal is a significant improvement over what we had since it is DIRECTLY linked and tied into the forum. A few of the features of the new system include:I’ve already tested our countdown clock, conference standings, and WAC scoreboard and they work fine, although I’m going to have to do some formatting to make them look right.
- Being able to log in and out directly from the homepage,
- Consistent look and feel with the forum (whatever style you are using for the forum will also be used on the homepage),
- A mini-calendar that shows upcoming events from the full calendar,
- Random polls (if you’ve started a poll on the forum, it will show up on the homepage),
- News_Bot’s posts will be the news displayed on the homepage (you don’t have to search for him any more),
- News archive which links to news that has rolled off the most recent additions,
- Search the forum directly from the homepage,
- Recently replied to threads are listed so you can go to them quickly,
- Who’s online and forum statistics,
- Significant increase in speed and load time for the homepage,
- And much, much more is available when we get the chance to roll them out!
BUT IT DOESN’T STOP THERE . . .
In addition to the vBadvanced portal, we’ve also installed a new links directory. You can get there from the link on the homepage OR through the Extra’s pull down menu on the navigation bar. This system is a big improvement and has a ton of features such as:The only thing waiting now is for YOU to start submitting links to the sites you know and love! I’ve set up several categories and if you know of one that needs to be added, just let me know.
- Fully integrated with vBulletin,
- Unlimited categories & sub-categories,
- Unlimited links,
- What's New & What's Popular sections,
- Allows members to comment on and rate links,
- Lets members define favorites and subscriptions,
- Reciprocal link checking,
- Advanced searching features.
- Auto-fill options which pre-populate the fields with the meta data from the web site being submitted.
- Sticky links.
- Shows the number of replies and links per category.
- Shows the number of hits, posts, last person to reply to links, and etc for each link.
- Advanced sorting options in each category.
- Allow users to send links to their friends.
- Allow users to report broken/problematic links.
- Options to show new and/or random links on your links directory index page.
- Optimized to handle thousands and thousands of links without a performance hit.
- And MUCH more!
I hope you enjoy the new homepage as well as the links directory and will give us your feedback and comments. If you have any questions or problems, just let me know!
Again, thanks for your support of Bulldog Barks & Bytes (www.LaTechBBB.com) and Louisiana Tech University. Thanks to you, we are making a difference in Tech Athletics!
Chris