====== New forums, user galleries and wiki ======

I'm so excited about this I just had to use the funky blue news item title that I normally reserve for major releases((Err...I've since changed the style, so never-mind.)). In a veritable explosion of PHP, I can now offer to the L3DT users' community a brand-new [[http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/|forum]], [[http://www.bundysoft.com/coppermine/|gallery]], and [[http://www.bundysoft.com/wiki/|wiki]]. Please think of these as your personal playgrounds.

To post images in the gallery or articles/files/whatever in the wiki, you first need to create an account in the forums. They all use the same data-base, so you don't need to create separate accounts for each. However, there are still some configuration issues to be sorted out, as described in [[http://www.bundysoft.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=7|this forum post]]. I also need to do a bit of template customisation to better-integrate the navigation of these systems with the main website and one another.

The [[http://groups.yahoo.com/group/L3DT_users_group/|mailing list]] will remain in operation for those who wish to use it, but I suspect it will slide into disuse in the face of this, dare I say it, **//WEB 2.0 ONSLAUGHT!!!!1111//**

For those that are interested, the forum uses [[http://www.phpbb.com/|phpBB2]], the gallery is [[http://coppermine-gallery.net/index.php|Coppermine]], and the wiki is [[http://wiki.splitbrain.org/|DokuWiki]]. I can't praise these packages enough; they were very easy to install (which is good, since I'm a day-one PHP n00b), and linking Coppermine and DokuWiku to the phpBB user database took a couple of minutes apiece. I'll let you know how the rest of the integration goes.