With the announcement of AdaptBB finally going under serious development for the first time in over 2 years, the release of AdaptBB 1.0 is finally going to happen and the work continues.

When it was decided that AdaptBB would be happening, it was then of course time to start the brainstoming. Whereas the CMS market is competitive, but has some holes and much to expand on, the forum market is practically locked up tightly but the two most popular - phpBB (open source) and vBulletin (paid).

However some unique features have been thought of for AdaptBB 1.0 and I'll share a few of those today.

CMS Integration

What will be a very important feature and very likely to be in AdaptBB 1.0 (don't want to make any promises) is CMS Integration.

CMS Integration in AdaptBB would mean you would share one users table and wouldn't have to worry about making users sign up twice, one for the main site and for the forums. Depending on the CMS you could edit profile details which would be used in the forums and other exciting possibilities.

In the beginning we will try to have integration for most of the big CMS's (like Drupal, Joomla!, etc.) and using this feature will be as simple as selecting the CMS and entering the table prefix during installation.

Forum Converter

While people do test out forum software, more often than CMS's, people find a forum script they at least find acceptable and stay with it. Because of this, not only do we want to build a good forum system, but also to actually get people to use it, in some cases we need to get people to switch over.

Unless they are going from forums they hate to ones they love, they aren't going to switch without some easy process so they don't lose forum data - posts, users, forums/categories, etc. In the beginng we plan on supporting a few of the big forum systems, adding support for more later on.

Custom Fields/Topic Types

Another unique feature, AdaptBB introduces Custom Fields and Custom Topic Types. I'll talk about both below:

• Custom Fields - A very useful feature seen in AdaptCMS, in AdaptBB you can also take advantage of custom fields in user profiles. Not only that, but you can create a custom field for when adding a new topic, replying to a post and even quick reply.
• Topic Types - The name is pretty self-explanatory but I'll explain. Traditionally you have a normal topic, Announcement and Sticky. With this you can create other types for various reasons. On a political forum you could have a topic type "News" which seperates itself from a normal topic. A lot of possibilities.

Conclusion

If you couldn't tell already, the big goal of AdaptBB is to become a very Adaptable forum script. Kind of like AdaptCMS, AdaptBB is shooting for that medium between super-packed with all the features you want (vBulletin) and a very light weight system. Forum scripts with everything you could want are useful, but can be quite daunting to new users.

We want AdaptBB to appeal to the newbie and the experienced user. Expect to see more AdaptBB blogs in the future and stay tuned here, as the new AdaptBB.com site will be launching by next week.

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