Despite the fact that Advanced Forum for D5 is alpha and the D6 version has a warning not to use it, there seems to be an awful lot of people using this module. While I've had a "to do" post up on the DruBB group for some time, I haven't written out my "plan of attack". So I decided to write up a roadmap so people can have an idea of where I'm headed. Some of this is straight copied from my post on the drubb group and some is new. Hopefully it will be helpful to people using the module. I'm going to enable comments for the moment but please do not use this for posting support/feature requests. Use the issue queue.

This is the plan:

1. Fix the known D5 bugs and do another alpha.
2. Fix the known D6 bugs and do a first alpha.
3. Do the code clean up section to make it easier for others to help.
4. Do the "Improving what's there" section.
5. Adding the new features in whatever order strikes my fancy. (Hey, life can't be totally planned. ;)
6. More alphas will come out as needed. I try to keep them coming on a regular basis to discourage people from using the devs as my dev versions tend to be broken.
7. Once I've added all the features that I plan to put in 1.x, I will make betas.
8. Much testing will ensue. Simpletest, maybe? I haven't looked into that whole testing business, yet.
9. RCs until it's all peachy.
10. Official 1.x release. Yay!
11. 2.x branch will start to keep up with core forum changes. Exactly when this will happen and what shape this will take is still up in the air. See the discussion.

This has nothing to do with Drupal but I'm trying to help get the word out. Kelly, a member of a Wisconsin forum I'm on runs a fish rescue / breeding business. She ran into bad luck with a scamming contractor and now the electric company is going to shut off her power in 2 days. The 12,000 fish she is currently caring for will all die when this happens.

About a week before Drupalcon, I was deleting a spam comment on groups.drupal.org and noticed it wanted me to report it to something called "Mollom". Suspecting this was the secret new anti spam program I'd been hearing rumors about for months, I did a search and found the beta site. The site was open to the public, said it was running a public beta, and had all the steps to get started.

The third incarnation of my user profiles tutorial, this time in module form, has arrived. I'd like to introduce the Advanced Profile module. It still needs work and isn't feature complete, but it's a good start and available to play around with.

It's been a long road getting here. In April of 2007, I spent a few weeks of free time learning nodeprofile and theming and put together what I thought was a pretty nice looking user profile for Coulee Region ONLINE. Since so many people had helped me learn while I struggled to create it, I decided to pass on the knowledge by writing a tutorial. It turned out to be more popular than I ever imagined and generated quite a few support requests. A lot of that was lost when I moved the tutorial between sites but I think the comments were over 400!

Having so many people use the tutorial pointed out a lot of flaws. Between that and improvements to the modules I used, I decided it was time to write a second version a few months later. This version improved on the first quite a bit but also had some issues I was never able to track down. The forums here are filled with support requests in addition to what I've gotten by email and on IRC. I'm having a terrible time keeping up with all the support and a few months ago I started thinking it was really time to do a version 3.

When building a business directory that will have non-admins adding entries and selecting categories, you need to make it as easy as possible. By default, Drupal offers up a multi select box to scroll through possibly hundreds of terms and control-click the categories you want your entry to be in. Definitely not user friendly.