Onto my third chu-hi and feeling like one sexay biatch, Igor is pleased to announce that JP Goth 3 is under development. Igor, together with two months’ supply of alcohol is going to be moving his booty and taking the site to the next level.

Yes, folks. PostNuke is just getting in my face with it’s queebles, limitations, unexpected template mis-handlings and Xanth issues. Let me put it this way, I can upload, install, launch and make my first post in fifteen minutes with the blogware I play with, but PostNuke it like fighting with Baal armed with a feather-duster. It’s quite a nice little system, truth be told, but it isn’t the user-friendly post fest that I would like. So it’s time to move elsewhere.

So in comes Xoops, a trippy little piece of ware with a Japanese-native support base. Yes, Japanese folks. That’s the next dimension in JP Goth. Don’t worry, I’m not going to forsake my English-able brethren. You guys are the reason for doing this site in the first place. But I got a new goal of going multi-lingual!

Multi-lingual is a bit of a misonomer, as it implies a bilingual system running all content from all contenders. Basicly, that isn’t going to work. The English-reading audience isn’t going to be too happy with moji-bake (unreadable characters), and the Japanese-reading audience doesn’t need half-assed handling of double-byte characters – character codes instead of beautiful Japanese. Even systems that run English/Spanish or the like come off a little weird. No, I want each group to experience JP Goth in their own language.

So the goal will be two systems running Xoops and Joops so we can jump from one to the other – if that’s your deal. Xoops/Joops are also much friendlier for community news. Essentially the basic posting mechanism will be just as easy as the board. I’ve also done a bit of preliminary testing with image uploading on the news console and found it was freaking easy – technical term.

Hopefully the Japanese version, Joops, will encourage a few people to post information on events in Japanese – which can be pealed off fairly quickly into English. And vice versa. Picture posting should be more stable and more pretty and the calendar should let users send information in without problem.

Igor hopes the basic launch will be viable by the end of August, assuming Xoops/Joops doesn’t create more problems than expected. The final goal will be to set up the Xoops/Joops, transfer all data across (or most of it anywhere) so users will only notice a small change when entering the site. Of course there’s a lot of work for an idiot like Igor (do I look like a programmer?), but I think it will be beneficial to hard-core users and occaisional visitors…. of course I could be wrong.

Anyway, I’m gonna do it and see what happens. If it fails, then this monster will remain online, but if it succeeds then w00t!

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