Pentaboard

The Last Cycle is powered by Pentaboard 1.0Beta. Pentaboard is a modified version of XMB (eXtreme Message Boards) and lends some features from UltimaBB as well.

The main reason why we left the XMB path was to make the boards more interesting to the end user. We've had great success so far. Why? Because we've listened to what the end user has said. They said 'make it fun' and 'make it interesting'. And I could see why - there was nothing but tables, tables, tables... Now, we are stepping away from that, with:

• Leaning towards CSS, rather than tabular presentation of data.
• Possibilities to theme for mobile/lightweight browsers
• Simple mobile (WAP) front-end thread/community browser
• Community focus (incentives to stay connected, bonding)
• Ajax for faster adding of books, rating threads, etc.
• Modularization of modifications
• Interesting user profiles (thank god!)
• Theme / skinning engine with more advanced dynamic options that allows you to have the skinning engine write CSS a file once per skin, and never have to process those theme variables again for that skin! This also speeds up the load times dramatically.
• Coatlique Engine: Coaltique judges members (in their profiles) on various factors: It may seem random - but it is not...
• Really simple SEO.
• Mods: User Blogs (not in use yet, due to instability), Bookshelves, books mod, tweaked download center mod, Play-by-Forum and Character Generation features and much much more

Pentaboard is still in early development, and may be so for a long time to come. It may never reach a production stage where it is ready for release.

  — torb, 26 Oct 2007, 16:10