Just under 2 months ago, I posted a
blog about what I have been up to that included some details about an upcoming module upgrade. Although it's been a long time coming , I am pleased to announced that we just finished up upgrading the forum here on dotnetnuke.com. If you follow the project at all, you know that we have had to delay the upgrade here many times due to many different things (which my previous blog post touches on). While the reasons for this vary, the main issue we were facing is the large number of users along with posts here, not to mention the amount of traffic this site sees. These factors along with the need to keep dotnetnuke.com running with minimal interruptions dictated that there needed to be some type of load testing done on the module prior to the upgrade.
The load testing was handled by several members of DNN Corporation, such as Keivan and Rob (both of whom I want to thank for their work). After having results like this available (it a chunk of time to get the resources available to do this), Keivan was able to quickly find the source of our problems (pretty much 1 line of code) and we finally got the module running here (the core had to be upgraded too before the module was upgraded here).
Let's move on to the fun stuff. The list of changes from the last version used here can noted in my previous blog posts about 4.5.3, however the version running here is 4.5.5. Besides the one change for performance, the only changes made to the module over the past couple months have involved user interface, Telerik integration, third party module integration and better core profile integration. At first, many of these difference will not be clear (besides user interface) but over time I think more and more will become obvious. For example, you can now upload an avatar to your DNN core profile. In turn, the forum module will now display this with all your posts (so long as your visibility for the profile item is properly set). This example actually covers all those differences (Telerik integration, better core profile integration, third party integration and user interface changes).
As for the user interface changes, a new theme was created by Cuong Dang which looks pretty good in my opinion and I am pretty sure most will agree (thanks Dang!). We also applied the updated avatars for team members (which look good too) and Scott W did some reorganization of the forums since we now have Sub-forums available with the module upgrade. Overall, I still feel confident that the module is in a far better place on this site than it was prior to the upgrade (especially w/ the before/after load testing results). Hopefully, the updated theme will really aid in usability here too. I can ramble on here forever but this should be enough for now.
If you notice any quarks, I started a new thread over in the forum module forum where you can post any issues you think may have been created by the upgrade. So, if you haven't seen the updated forum jump on over to that portion of the site and thanks to everyone for their patience.