Brendon — you’re 100% correct.
I have been planning to make the new message boards myself for quite some time, and even started working on it. I had a very basic version ready in PHP and MySQL. I still would like to continue making my own message boards, but there are several reasons that I chose for the current option during development.
The most important one is, as you already mentioned, time constraints. If I would have continued making my own message boards, they would not have been ready by now, and all my spare time in the time to come would have gone into developing the boards, instead of working on the rest of Teethgrinder.com and the offical T? site.
Another -although less, but still important- reason is the fact that I develop web applications for a living, which is great fun, but also gets tiresome if I get home after work, eat, sit behind my computer, and continue programming.
Now that I use these vBulletin message boards, I can devote my time to (1) actually ‘managing the community’ itself, (2) tweaking on details to improve usability instead of resolving bugs/programming new features and (3) add other stuff to both sites. When there is a bug, security problem or newly developed feature I simply download and install an update instead of spending hours/days programming.
I still agree with you on the fact that too much features is not a good thing. I do believe however, like we discussed as well, that some new features which weren’t available in the old boards are very good to have, like searching previous messages, pseudo-html (links, etc.) and more ‘community-features’ like a member-list.
My plans for the (near) future as far as Therapy? web-sites are concerned is improving usability on the message boards, finishing and launching the new official site and improving Teethgrinder.com.
Finally, regarding the usability issue, I have had various people offering me feedback on the new message boards and those will help me improving them usability wise. If you would like to get involved I would love to hear your detailed feedback on what things you found complicated and what you would like to improve / see improved. Get in touch with me if you want to help out. Thanks!
To answer your last question, yes, I wll be using PHP to make the new official site, but there won’t be a lot of very ‘technical’ features in it. The main focus is content. Teethgrinder.com will remain ASP based for the time being. Getting into different languages/platforms adds a bit of extra fun for me and keeps/gets me experienced in a broader scope of my field of ‘expertise’. Cheers!
