So, it’s been a couple days since RBDevZone has debuted with its new look. I’d love to get your thoughts and also give you a little bit of background as to why it changed.

The main reason for the change is that the old site, which was very functional, just wasn’t much fun to use. The site was slower than I liked and its organization and structure was dictated by the platform it was built on, DotNetNuke. It was a pain to add content, so content tended to get out of date. And there was no good way to have an RSS feed of the content to encourage people to check back often. In the fast-paced world of online communities, if you don’t adapt you become irrelevant.

So the redesign focused on creating a site that is fun to use, relevant and current. After all, REALbasic is fun to use, right? I decided to use the WordPress blog engine to do this and I think it works pretty well. All articles and posts can now be easily added, will appear in the RSS feed (which I encourage you to subscribe to) and will be easier to get indexed by search engines. There can now be fixed pages for RBUnit, UltraToolBar, RegCode and any other utilities that get hosted here. And there is a still a forum, although you’ll need to register to post to it.

Speaking of registering, a common complain I had with the original RBDevZone was that people didn’t like having to register to download files. Well, now you don’t have to. Although you can still register if you like, it is completely optional. Unfortunately your old RBDevZone registration cannot carry over to WordPress. I will consider manually moving these old registrations, if enough people are interested.

I’m also open to bringing a few other people on board as volunteer content authors. If you’re interested in writing posts for RBDevZone and think you have something to bring to the REALbasic community, let me know.

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