MapForums

It looks like blogging may be built into vBulletin in the near future --

New Official vBulletin Add-on Products - vBulletin Community Forum

I'd like to take advantage of this on mapforums, I would like for it to become the backend CMS for MP2Kmag News and What's New. Also, people can keep their own MapPoint or Virtual Earth related blogs. It could be something as simple as keeping a record / bookmarks of your favorite threads on this site and commentary or other notes and observations.

The Project Tools below also looks pretty neat for organizing projects. One idea for instance would be to sketch out and organize creating a MapPoint subroutine / library from the various articles and other public domain code samples out there for MapPoint 2006. We might first put it together for VB/VBA and then port to other languages.

More info listed below --

Blog and Social Networking

In response to user requests we have been working on a blogging system that will fully integrate with vBulletin. vBulletin Blog (a working title) will allow sites running vBulletin to extend the functionality to allow forum users to maintain weblogs from their user control panel and leverages the extensive vBulletin permissions system to enable administrators to fine-tune the features available to their visitors.

Blogs can be made private, with blog authors themselves able to create a list of users permitted to view their messages, while the vBulletin inline moderation system makes it easy to ensure that blogs and comments do not contain unwanted material.

Trackback and pingback support is fully integrated, so site owners can expect to quickly find related sites linking back to their own, improving search engine rankings and building traffic.

Additionally, vBulletin Blog adds social networking functionality to your vBulletin installation, which will allow your users to quickly and safely make connections and form relationships. Member profile pages are extended to include an enhanced buddy system, visitor tracking, blog integration and a comment system, all housed within a new and improved profile page template together with improved delivery of existing profile information.

As usual with vBulletin, every feature and template can be endlessly customised via the admin control panel, and can be extended even further with additional 3rd party plugins.

We are committed to developing tools to enhance your community and unite your members, and with the introduction of blogging and social networking support, vBulletin has become an advanced, exciting, platform on which your community can grow and flourish.

Project Tools

During the development process for the new products, it became clear that it would be necessary to develop a means of managing each new product from conception to completion, and to keep track of progress on multiple projects in one central interface.

To that end, it was decided to merge our existing bug tracker and internal feature tracker into a new, purpose-built system that would support multiple projects and be far more flexible in its application.

It soon became clear as this system was being written that it could be used for managing many other project types as well as software development. Given the number of requests we've had in the past for the bug tracker to be released, the decision was taken to go the extra step and make the system available to customers as an add-on product for vBulletin.

vBulletin Project Tools (also a working title) is the result of that development effort. We have been using the new tools internally for some time now and they have made significant improvements to the way we can keep tabs on how development is progressing. We intend to migrate our existing bug tracker to the new system next week, at which point everyone will be able to have a look around the system.