The Future's Here, The Future's Purple

So after surprisingly few bugs found during the launch of the AN Guide (about two dozen, more than half cosmetic) I decided it was time to break stuff properly.

My intentions had been for a piece-by-piece roll out of additional options, starting with allowing everyone else to add their own gigs, shows, events, bands, whatevers but plans & intentions have never been favourites. Instead Christmas time was spent playing with new toys.

The new toys being the next version of the vBulletin software upon which the Guide is built. New versions are a mix of scary and exciting for third-party developers like myself. Scary because you're never sure just how much of your own code will break and need rewritten at speed to keep up. And exciting because there's always new possibilities revealed.

And in the spirit of Christmas, all my code works perfectly well on the new version, built in future-proofing I can feel kinda smug about (even if it is half down to the vB Devs!)

The exciting possibilities? Well it's tabs. Yes, the forum software is going to go all MySpace on you and have lots of funky social networking features on your profile page and that means tabs. It may not sound like much to you, but to me-trying to cram heaps of information all onto a single web page-tabs are cool. Well implemented & fast rendering tabs are shiny, shiny goodness.

In fact, too good to wait for. So I uploaded a couple of files from the new software and got it to work for me here & now. I even succombed to a request and uploaded a new purple grape style http://www.altnation.com/guide/aberdeen/?styleid=45

And on that smug note I shall gloss over all the stuff I broke while adding the tabs. No one will notice, I'm sure...