Behind the Scenes at DaniWeb: What's Worked and What's Next

NEW YORK, May 1, 2012 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- DaniWeb, the 10 year-old technology forum with over a million members, has launched a massive site redesign, moving from its original vBulletin platform to a proprietary system written by site founder and CEO Dani Horowitz. The site received media attention last year when it was hit hard by the Google Panda update, and documented its strong come back - DaniWeb's original post in the Google Groups forum.

The new propriety system boasts an interface designed from the ground up to be geared specifically for its unique developer-centric audience. It encompasses features that could not be otherwise achieved through any preexisting platform. Addition benefits focus on its sheer simplicity and unified design. Prior versions had all of the DaniWeb-specific features essentially retrofit onto the existing vBulletin forum platform. Now, everything is designed and developed with the DaniWeb users in mind.

From an end-user standpoint, the posting system now uses the Markdown syntax instead of the more widely-used BBCODE syntax, for formatting posts. Markdown, a lightweight syntax, is gaining popularity among technology-geared UGC sites through its use on Github and StackOverflow.

DaniWeb also added its twist on social media, with more to come over the next few weeks. Significant "security" measures have also been put in place, entirely eliminating bot-generated forum spam (making XRumer a thing of the past), and significantly cutting down on many common issues plagued by programming forums, such as poorly formatted code snippets.

The backend of the system has also seen a massive overhaul in usability, with more efficient ways of handling spam and offensive posts. Additional staff on the moderation team will help make DaniWeb a more pleasant experience for readers overall.

And, of course, there is a heavy emphasis on SEO, as one would expect from DaniWeb. Such improvements include making use of HTML 5 microdata, improved Google sitemaps, and XSLT-styled RSS feeds. Staying true to convictions, DaniWeb employs the same methodology outlined in its post-Panda recovery of making heavy use of its tag clouds on every page. Tag clouds were thought to have been one of the major culprits in why it was initially hit by Panda last year, as it would have been flagged for "keyword stuffing". The tag cloud overhaul is now injected into the page via client-side JavaScript, pulled from a page blocked via robots.txt.

From a systems perspective, both the old and new versions of DaniWeb were written for a LAMP environment. The relaunch was the catalyst for a complete overhaul of the database schema, with the database being denormalized and making even heavier use of Memcached as its caching mechanism. The code has been switched to an MVC-architecture using the CodeIgniter PHP framework. As a result, the new version is faster and runs off of less hardware than before.

About DaniWeb: DaniWeb is an online discussion community of everything IT related under one roof, providing a one-stop solution for developers, tech enthusiasts, corporate professionals, and novices on virtually every IT topic imaginable.

Media Contact: Kerry Webber DaniWeb LLC., 516.222.1700x16, [email protected]

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SOURCE DaniWeb LLC.