I want to give you a short heads-up on a change coming to the Alfresco Forums. In short, we are migrating the Alfresco Forums to a new platform. This is part of a larger initiative aimed at reducing the number of accounts required to engage with the Alfresco community, making it easier to fight spam and moderate the forums, and put us on a platform that will enable us to make the entire community experience better going forward.

Jeremy French is the developer leading up this effort, and he’s recently created a screencast that shows some of the new features:

If you watched the screencast, you may have noticed that we are consolidating our local language forums into one platform. This means that if you are participating in both the German forum and the English forum, for example, you won’t need multiple accounts and you won’t have to switch between the two systems. If you want to see forum posts written in German, change the language dropdown to German. French? Change the dropdown to French.

The new forums will have the same functionality you are used to, plus:

• A new look-and-feel that matches the current alfresco.com theme.
• A “folksonomy” of tags to help authors add additional context to their posts.
• The ability to select a specific Alfresco version to associate with a topic.
• Richer subscription options for both email notifications and feeds.
• Gravatar integration.
• Richer and more visible leaderboards.

The migration is about one month away. When we migrate, we will make sure that all of the data in the current forums comes across, including user accounts. As you saw in the screencast, URLs that point to threads in the existing forum will continue to work after the migration.

Immediately after go-live I think we’ll have a much improved forum system. But the whole reason we are going to the trouble is so that we can enhance it further with feedback from the community. So please do let us know if you have ideas we should consider for the backlog.

If you are coming to DevCon Berlin or San Jose and you want to play with the test forums, come find me or Richard Esplin and we’ll give you a peek.