Version 5 UBBC Preview

ProBoards is still hard at work on our next generation forum software, ProBoards Version 5, and while it isn't quite ready yet for public beta, we thought we might share some of what you can expect from us in the future.

Many of the UBBC (also known as BBCode) tags you know and love have received new options. In this blog entry we'll walk you through a few samples of changes being made.

Right now there are many different UBBC tags that you can combine to achieve a desired effect. For example, you may want to change the color, font, and text size of your posts. Currently, all of these options have separate UBBC tags. With Version 5, you can achieve the same effect with only one tag.

Using the current system, this is how you would change the font to Arial, the color to blue, and the size to 5:

[font=Arial][color=#0000ff][size=5]... your text here ...[/size][/color][/font]

With ProBoards Version 5, we have introduced all new options to the [font] tag. You can now achieve the same results as above with the following code:

[font family="Arial" color="#0000ff" size="5"]... your text here ...[/font]

Both of these codes would output:
... your text here ...

Another example of a tag with new options is the [list] tag. Currently you can only put a bulleted list in your posts like so:

• Option 1
• Option 2
• Option 3

With Version 5, we are introducing both ordered and unordered lists along with many different list styles. Here is an example of what a list could look like with our new list options:

• Square 1
  1. Upper-Roman 1
  2. Upper-Roman 2
  3. Upper-Roman 3
• Square 2
  1. Lower-Alpha 1
  2. Lower-Alpha 2
  3. Lower-Alpha 3
     • Decimal 1
     • Decimal 2
     • Decimal 3

We'd like to go over one last example of our new UBBC tag options, and this one relates to how tables are displayed. This section may be more suited to those who understand HTML tables and a bit of CSS.

Currently our [table], [tr], and [td] tags are very basic. They have no additional options that you can add in. We felt that tables were very lacking in customization, which is why we have introduced a whole new host of attributes that you can modify.

For the [table] tag, there are new attributes width, height, border-style, border-color, and border-width.

With the [tr] tag, we have added the attributes background-color, vertical-align, and text-align.

Finally, with the [td] tag we have added rowspan, colspan, background-color, vertical-align, text-align, width, height, border-width, border-style, and border-color.

With all of these attributes you will have unprecedented control over how your posts appear on ProBoards forums you visit. There are many other tags that have received changes that are not listed here. A complete, detailed list of all attributes our new UBBC tags support will be provided in our help guide.

Please note that the upgrades to our UBBC tags are part of our upcoming ProBoards Version 5 forum software. We currently have no date available for when these features will be released for testing through our open beta. When such a date is available we will announce it here on this blog.