It officially feels like December here at the blackhatzen offices. Snow is on the ground, coats are no longer optional, and we’re spending more and more time inside enjoying the warmth. Aside from providing customer support, we have three things on our agenda this month:
- Forum Generator 2.0
- WP Guardian 1.4
- Referer Guardian 1.3
Forum Generator 2.0
Over the last 24 hours, the basic framework that will become Forum Generator 2.0 has been written. We’re going to continue with the same UI stylistically, but a lot of changes are happening under the hood. A massive overhaul of the gathering system is my biggest priority at the moment, along with adding support for various forum platforms other than phpBB3. While phpBB has a lot to offer, it is limited by a lack of basic plugin support. After spending some time working with the bbPress and vBulletin forum platforms more closely, this limitation is blatantly obvious. As development continues, my plan is to continue updating the blog with what I’m finding so that others who are developing plugins for forum platforms can gain from what will most likely be a major learning experience for me.
WP Guardian 1.4
I’m going to begin integrating some of the features requested in this post, as well as changes and bug-fixes we’ve discovered since the last release. One thing that I plan on working on is the UI. Specifically, I’d like to integrate some of the design features used in Referer Guardian to make it easier for users to assign links to advertisements and advertisements to posts, pages, and categories. Once the feature set of 1.4 becomes set in stone, I’ll update the blog.
Referer Guardian 1.1
The Referer Guardian launch was a success. We’ve received a handful of feature requests for the next version from customers. One big new feature will be the inclusion of basic statistics into the Referer Guardian control panel. This tracking isn’t intended to compete with any of the various analytics packages available, but will allow Referer Guardian users the ability to see how their campaigns are performing in real-time.
Other News
During non-development hours in the next week or so, I’m going to put together a thorough tutorial (or potentially series of tutorials) on utilizing WP Guardian and Referer Guardian together. This probably should have been done before launch, but the main focus at that point in time was testing. We are also requesting that customers of any of our products provide us feedback ASAP for any new features they’d like to see in the next releases of all three of our current products.
That is all for now. I hope you all are having a good December and looking forward to a great start to the new year.
