Discussion of this post is welcome. Please use the comments form at the bottom of this page. Please do NOT post about this on our forums for now. Thanks.

Hey everyone,

This exciting announcement is being exclusively announced first to our Twitter members and the 500-Club on the message board.

As many of you know, I have wanted to bring blogs to Ostomyland for well over 5 years and there’s been a couple of failed tests of beta mods for phpbb3. These mods showed me that it wasn’t worth going thru all the hassle of adding blogs to the site unless it was easy for people to use, and intuitively connected to the site or board in a seamless way.

PHPBB3 has served us reasonably well considering its freeware, but its lack of reliability at peak times, and lack of desired functionality means it’s been holding Oland back, and the time has come to bite the bullet and replace it.

I have been searching for software that would allow people to have “one login” for as many Ostomyland features as possible – and I’ve found it!

Last week, I heavily invested ($250+) into the Ostomyland community/sites future, by purchasing some professional community software.

The software is Invision Power Board, and with being licensed software it means I now have access to professional tech support, constant security updates and feature improvements of paid-for business quality, not freebie spare-time development.

There will be a host of new features and accessibility improvements coming to Ostomyland thanks to this software, and the features I’m most excited about for the community is listed later in this post.

Thanks to this new software your current board login will cover the new board, your new blog and the new gallery. Hurrah!

Additionally, you will be able to choose whether to use your existing Facebook account to register to, and log in to, the Ostomyland message board! Wow!

The new software is currently in testing with the admins. I hope (but cannot guarantee) to have a pre-launch/advance testing sessions for all members, but certain groups of the community (such as the 500 Posts group, or Facebook and Twitter members etc) will almost certainly get an advance hands on with the software as a thank you for their supporting Ostomyland so much over the last 11 years.

The software should go live sometime this summer. I’m confident that 99% of all member accounts will be converted over to the system to stop people having to sign up all over again, and also expect to convert the vast majority of our existing message board support-content over to the new system too. There will possibly be a pruning of the off topic forums, but that is yet to be decided and depends upon how future conversion tests go.

The new features we’re most proud of are:

1. Blogs for every member – At long last! Thanks to the new message board having blogging capability inbuilt from the get go, the time for Ostomyland to have blogs is finally here!

2. Facebook Features Integrated – Update the board with your FB status, profiles, and even more. Further functionality will be added in the coming months.

3. Oland Photo Gallery Integration – It always used to be a separate part of the site, needing yet another login and password, but now it’s integrated into the board.

4. Post rating – Has someone’s answer really impressed you – then leave a vote for it. Members will have a limited number of votes available daily to cast on posts they think are helpful to the original posters support request. These post votes also count towards the users reputation. There are settings available to prevent this being abused too, so it wont just become a “u vote for me, I’ll vote for you”-friend-fest.

5. Improved Admin and Moderation Features – this will not affect 99.9% of members directly, but thanks to more advanced and detailed admin features, the site admins and moderators can serve you better and help keep the board as secure and safe as is possible today.

6. Special formatting for mobile devices and low bandwidth computers: Got an Iphone or some other net enabled phone or device? Then the new Ostomyland board has a special low-resource format which will automatically display whenever you access the site via your phone or Ipod/Iphone. You’ll have full functionality available, but in a far less demanding download experience so it will be quick to load, and far easier to browse on cramped screens.

7. Keyboard Editing Shortcuts – As anyone who uses Word or equivalent software, formatting keyboard shortcuts are so handy. To BOLD some text just highlight it and press CTRL + B, and editing is easier with CTRL X (cut) or CTRL C (copy) and CTRL V (paste) and many other shortcuts are available too so that most of the usual formatting shortcuts from Word etc are available when writing or editing a post.

8. Login integrated to the main site (coming after board launch) – You’ll be able to log in to the board over on our main site www.ostomyland.com/mainsite/ and if you click register over there, you’ll no longer be trying to create an almost worthless wordpress author account, but a shiny new board account, which you’ll be able to login to over on the main site, and still be able to leave comments etc. This should also help bring users to the community thanks to a far more streamlined and functional user-account that covers the vast majority of Ostomyland’s services.

9. Revamped Ostomyland Chat Room integrated to the board and user accounts – I’ve yet to decided totally on this, it depends how tests go, but I’m looking into totally revamping the Ostomyland Chat Room, by integrating it into the message board, and linking it to user accounts within. The software is IP Chat (aka ParaChat) and gives users a permanently available chat room available via the board, with lists of in-chat users available without having to enter the room. It would help create a bridge between the so far un-crossable chat room / message board gulf, and also provide full logging, private messaging and all the usual chat room features are available. If this were free, or included with Invision Power Board by default it would be a no brainer to including (esp. as we’ve been having a few headaches with the java chat lately), but this feature will cost me $20 a month, and with donations this year only covering a couple months at most, it’s going to mean another large investment from me to action; Hence the indecision on whether to include it, or not.

For an in-advance sneak peak of the new software check out the Invision Power Board’s company website and the screenshots below which show our test board in action (click the thumbnails for full sized screenshot).