The year 2009 is drawing to a close and it was quite a successful year for us. We have released the best Burning Board of all times with Burning Board 3.1 "Volcano" and our sales have grown extraordinarily. The release of the plugins Blog und Gallery as well as styles like "Blue Space" und "Pure.Chrome" have also been a real success.
I'd like to use the opportunity to offer a raw outlook on the next year and explain whith projects we are busy with at the time and in the upcoming year. Please bear in mind, that not all projects covered in this topic are due to release in 2010. We have set up a good basis for community websites with our community framework and our framework based software Burning Board can already be extended with numerous community functions by a large list of plugins. In the long run we will continue to expand our product portfolio with even more community applications offering our customers further options to combine them with their community websites.
The start of the upcoming year will see our team to be expanded with new employees for customer services and development. We are already in talks with well skilled people who are eager to work with us, so we are confident to be able to present the new ones to you soon. The release of the new website is also scheduled for the beginning of the next year. Besides a new and up-to-date look we want to simplify purchasing and management of licenses. Additionally we want to expand our documentations area and offer a bugtracker to better handle bug messages.
We target the the release of Burning Board Lite 2.1 (Codename "Aurora") in the first half of 2010. This version will be based upon WCF 1.1 and bring a lot of new functions. Additionally we want to offer updates for Blog and Calendar in the first half-year. We have collected a large pile of suggestions and wishes for both applications posted by our customers and we are trying to implement a lot of them as soon as possible to make those applications even more attractive.
Furthermore we are still developing WoltLab Community Framework Version 1.2 (Codename "Maelstrom"). This version will invent some technical innovations being separately talked about at time in another entry in my blog. There will also be a new version of Burning Board based upon WCF 1.2, Version 3.2 code named "Dragon". The changes in this versions will not be such fundamental ones as in former versions, but we have gathered some nice ideas to enhance forum and the entire handling of it.
There will be also a complete new product in our portfolio, WoltLab Community Portal (Codename "Earthquake"). With our portal software you will be able to combine the many community applications on a central start page and let the user customize this page to his own wishes. The portal will offer functions to create your own pages and to integrate them into the site structure. Also you'll be able to embed special imformation from one application into another by a special "box-model".
Also completely new will be WoltLab Community Database (Codename "Excalibur"). This will be a modification of the database already operated as download database at our well known WoltLab Community. Users of the database will be able to offer their (optionally selected) users different files types for download. Also implemented will be familiar features like categorization, tagging, rating und comments.
We will inform you about the new products as well as the new versions of WCF and Burning Board more precisely over the year 2010. Please understand that we do not want to talk about the details of the innovations at this time. Finally i'd like to thank you all for keeping faith in us and wish all of you a merry christmas and a happy new year!
