June 15th, 2018 at 2:56 AM
I'm definitely a tad bit concerned about jumping to 1.9 if it will break nearly all of our plugins, but I don't really mind the idea of making some new ones to replace the old ones if that is what we decide to do. The shoutbox will be the hardest to do that with, so I'll probably just hack the living daylights out of it to make it work on 1.9 if nobody has a better one released. 
But that does bring a good point. If we do some design work and make this one responsive, there is barely any incentive to really go to 1.9 regardless, being that very few other features will really be released with it. The only downside is that we won't really be on the "cutting edge" so much, and some of the plugins and updates from the community will probably be focused more on 1.9 going forward. If they end up releasing a 1.9 beta in the very-near-future, I think we will just end up jumping on the gun and going for it. If it looks like it's still going to be a little while (and it appears that it is), we will probably just continue to focus on 1.8 and go from there.
There is a small part of me that feels like phpBB is probably the way to go (with a completely from-the-ground up redesign, probably to look similar to what we have now) and some plugins to considerably flesh it out. But the work involved in doing that would be pretty considerable. Nobody here really has much experience with it, so we'd all be learning a completely new software and that would add considerably to the time required to make a viable site with it. The theme would be the hardest in my opinion. They have a full template engine and everything of that sort already, out-of-the-box, but you have to mess around with editing files and there is no ACP interface. It's just so different from the MyBB way of doing things that it feels so foreign to use.
But that does bring a good point. If we do some design work and make this one responsive, there is barely any incentive to really go to 1.9 regardless, being that very few other features will really be released with it. The only downside is that we won't really be on the "cutting edge" so much, and some of the plugins and updates from the community will probably be focused more on 1.9 going forward. If they end up releasing a 1.9 beta in the very-near-future, I think we will just end up jumping on the gun and going for it. If it looks like it's still going to be a little while (and it appears that it is), we will probably just continue to focus on 1.8 and go from there.
There is a small part of me that feels like phpBB is probably the way to go (with a completely from-the-ground up redesign, probably to look similar to what we have now) and some plugins to considerably flesh it out. But the work involved in doing that would be pretty considerable. Nobody here really has much experience with it, so we'd all be learning a completely new software and that would add considerably to the time required to make a viable site with it. The theme would be the hardest in my opinion. They have a full template engine and everything of that sort already, out-of-the-box, but you have to mess around with editing files and there is no ACP interface. It's just so different from the MyBB way of doing things that it feels so foreign to use.
