Young Composers Roadmap - August 2006 Onwards
Soon, Young Composers will undergo a series of major changes, the most significant being that we plan to switch forum software from Invision Power Board to vBulletin. Alongside this change sit the other two planned major changes: the introduction of music management software, and the introduction of social networking software.
In order to help give members a feel that they are involved in this ongoing process, as well as to keep everyone up to date on where progress stands, a roadmap with a list of changes or new features planned for the site will be maintained below. As and when new features on the roadmap are implemented, the appropriate entry/entries in the list will turn green. If a feature is put on hold or we are experiencing difficulties in implementing it, the entry will instead turn orange. If a feature gets scrapped altogether, the entry will turn red.
[P] prefixed to an entry indicates that this feature is being considered as a possibility only.
Without further ado, here is the roadmap:
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Overall Status
Forum software conversion complete. Now planning introduction of social networking software (plus friendly URLs for forum).
Planned Changes
- New forum software (vBulletin)
- AJAX (realtime) shoutbox
- Custom profile field for Skype name
- "Orphaned thread" system which highlights music posted in the forum that does not appear to have received much attention
- Friendly URLs
- Music management system (software package not yet fully decided upon. Note that in order to upload digital audio files such as MP3s to this system, you may required to pay a small subscription fee which will act to offset the added cost your music's presence will bring about)
- Ability to upload MP3s and other files in digital audio format
- Friendly URLs for presentable and easily-accessible user pages (e.g. youngcomposers.com/music/users/Mike)
- Ability to add comments etc. to posted music
- Social networking software (custom designed)
- Maintain a MySpace-like personal page with information about you, links to your music etc.
- Buddy system
- Create bulletins when you post new music to attract attention to it
- One-to-one realtime IM contact with another member
- [P] Blog system
- Other
- Site-wide authentication - one account signup will grant member access to the whole site
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Probably the one feature that will take the longest to roll out is site-wide authentication, meaning in laymen's terms that once you log into one piece of software, you should remain logged in to every other piece of software as you browse around the site. This may not actually even be entirely possible in the end, but rest assured that we will work hard at achieving it.
There will also be new specific bugs forums added which members may use to report any issues they encounter; an inevitability taking into account the magnitude of the planned changes.
New entries will likely be added to the roadmap as and when we get a clearer idea of exactly what there is to achieve.
Hope you like what you see, and of course don't hesitate to ask for any extra features you think are missing to be added to the roadmap. Please remember to be patient regarding progress though! Things like this, especially when done properly, take a lot of time and effort. Finally, any members possessing expertise applicable to the plans are encouraged to offer their services, as having an extra hand around never hurts. Specifically, we are looking for anyone with digital image manipulation skills (e.g. the ability to adjust the hue/saturation of GIF files in Photoshop, and specifically the ability to batch process or batch edit files).