Active Forums 4.2 is going to address several items, but also introduce some changes that will greatly improve performance and scalability. Active Forums 4.0 was a completely new module and data structure when compared to previous versions. I have been told before that I'm an extremist when it comes to performance, but performance is the key ingredient to a successful product. This has always been the strong point of Active Forums. However, with Active Forums 4.x it takes a little more to make it truly perform it's best. Now, 80% of all sites using Active Forums will never notice any sort of performance degradation. The remaining 20% represent a combination of sites with high traffic, large volumes of content or simply poor server resources. We could have simply written some documentation or raised the minimum requirements, but that really doesn't solve the problem.
Another strong point of Active Forums is the lengthy and flexible feature set. While addressing some of the performance issues, we also wanted to improve individual forum configuration. We also needed to make configuration options easy to access. Active Forums 4.2 will introduce a new feature called "Config Sets". A "Config Set" is the collection of all the settings that are available for a forum. This gives you the ability to define a set of features and apply them to any forum. You can define a Config Set before you even create the forum. You can also create a Config Set based off of an existing forum. Super Users have the option to mark a Config Set as "global" or "global default". The global setting makes the config set visible to all module instances across all portals. Global default replaces the Active Forums default configuration across all portals. Many other features are on the road map that are specific to Super User configuration, but those will be after the 4.2 release. For instance, we want to give the Super User the option to lock configurations. This would mean that a portal owner or module admin would have to select from a list of predefined configurations. Of course, the default behavior would be just as it has always been.
Permission Sets are very similar to Config Sets. Permissions will be separate from configurations. When we were going through various scenarios and use cases we found that you would end up with more Config Sets when permissions were included.
How does this help performance? It really comes down to the way we store and retrieve the settings with each page request. We are able to cache this information in a much more efficient way that works well across various server configurations. Our database queries are optimized so that they are retrieving less data and focused on content rather than configuration. We have eliminated the need to store specific settings for each forum which reduces database size and memory utilization. Even if you wish to have unique settings for each forum, fewer resources will be used and you will still see better performance.
I'm sure there are more than a couple customers thinking this sounds like the makings of a painful upgrade. This will be a direct upgrade, just like all others with the exception of 3.7 to 4.0. The upgrade process does make several database changes and migrate data. We have added several precautions to make sure the upgrade will not cause any downtime for your site. First, we are not going to delete anything. We will leave the structure for your old settings untouched for several releases. Second, the conversion to Config and Permission Sets is the very last part of upgrade install. If the script fails Active Forums will still use your old settings, but display a message in the Active Forums control panel telling you to contact support. The majority of the install problems we see are related to installs where data was imported from another product. We have been testing with several large installations and have not encountered any upgrade issues yet.
The upgrade process will attempt to consolidate your current settings into new permission and config sets. The worse case scenario is that you will end up with unique config sets for each forum. All it will take is for one setting to be different and a new config set will be created. The upgrade script also scans the database looking for any forums that are inheriting settings from a group. If any are found it will create a config set based upon the group and apply that to the proper forums.
What excites me the most about the Config Set feature is how we have made it easier for you to manage your forums. You can manage forums the same way you always have or use some of the new features. All Config Sets are listed in the Active Forums Control Panel. Each Config Set lists the forums where it is currently being used. If you have the proper permissions, you can also view and/or edit the forum configuration without accessing the control panel. This should make Active Social customers extremely happy since they will be able to manage group forums from within the Active Social Control Panel.
Active Forums 4.2 will be feature complete this week. The following week will be nothing but internal QA and security testing. A release date will be set the week after.