devpals.com

[delaen1]

Introducing:


where developers find answers

http://www.devpals.com

Our team has spent a significant amount of time getting this up and running and today we finally launched. The Vbulletin.org community has been absolutely amazing during this process, so I want to give a great big thank you to everyone for their hard work and inspiration. We've incorporated so many of your useful tips, hints, and design ideas in to this site.

devpals will be a very exciting resource for developers. A place to quickly get answers to development questions and expand your network of developer friends (devpals ).

We've made the interface as simple as possible and streamlined the posting/reading process as much as we could. While the classic vBulletin layout is wonderful for forum based discussion, we felt it impeded too much on what we were trying to accomplish: ask question, get answer, move on with your work. Our long-term goal is to make every feature available within 1-3 obvious clicks while still maintaining a clean, simple look and feel.

The homepage doesn’t display a list of forums. It shows a consolidated list of all the latest questions/answers. This was made possible by a tweaking of the Show Latest Threads mod made by Chris M. We feel this gives a better overview of the community as a whole, but we also understand that a lot of developers are only going to be interested in a single topic, so easy access to the separate sections is available on the right-hand side of every page.

Search plays a major role in devpals. In the standard vBulletin installation, search is somewhat hard to find and use. Or at the very least it’s not featured as prominently as we like. We moved it to the header and made it simple to search the different sections. One of the important things that makes devpals easier to use is the ability to ask a new question directly from the search results page.

When flowing through a site, I generally search to see if my question has already been answered. If it has, great! If it hasn’t? Ah crap, now I have to go back to the forum list, find the right place to put it, find the “new thread” button, and then start writing my post. The way it works at devpals is you search, get results, and if you can’t find what you’re looking for you can immediately ask a new question using the form at the top of the results page. This process is still being streamlined more and more and in the coming weeks we should have a fully ajax-ified way to do this.

Using a modified version of Friend and/or Buddies on Profile, we’ve made “devpals” (buddy lists) play an increased role. At the top of every member’s profile (which is heavily altered), is a button that says “add to devpals”. This brings this often overlooked feature to the forefront, making the social networking applications much easier to use. Once a member is one of your devpals, you will have easy access to all their latest questions, answers, and a slew of other upcoming features that make getting your questions answered easier. After all, who’s more likely to help you out than a friend? Like I mentioned, we have some exciting new features planned that will make it simple to stay on top of what your devpals are up to.

The member profile is completely changed. At the top of every profile you can find the most used features. “my questions”, “my posts”, and “my devpals” with an easier to use tab-based interface. “my devpals” lists all the members who the user has befriended, as well as those that have befriended them with links to show their latest questions and more. Other cool stuff is being added to this shortly; everything in the name of making it easier to keep up with what they’re doing.

Contact information is easier to find and we’ve placed an increased emphasis on the content that users really want to share. The “about me” section. Links to your blog…whatever they want. Also in the works is an interface for members to put RSS feeds of their latest blog entries directly in their profile.

“my profile” also serves as the usercp when users are logged in. Thanks goes out for the handy tip that made this relatively easy to do.

A few of the other upcoming features are:

• devpal-only posts. These are questions that are only shown to those on your devpal list.
• devpal groups (a private, invitation only forum for members of groups – I believe there is already a mod out there that accomplishes this that we’ll be using).
• devpal rankings. This is a points based system that will rank users by how effective they are at answering questions. It will work differently from standard “point” systems, so stay tuned.
• A myriad of other social networking tools including new ways to put devpals content on YOUR site.

We chose vBulletin because it’s so simple to customize a site without laying a hand on the back-end code. Every modification here was done with simple template modifications or plugins. There are some handy features that we’ve removed entirely in the name of simplifying the process, but they’ll probably make a return shortly when we figure out a way to re-introduce them without cluttering the interface.

Thank you to everyone for all your help and guidance. Bug reports would be extremely useful. This is a very exciting time for us and we expect things to pick-up rapidly. We’re striving to add some innovation to the way developers share ideas and solve their problems, so keep an eye on us.

PS: There is a php section!