The first fruits of the labours with our Importing system has just been pushed to the live system. You can now import posts and comments from your Wordpress Blog into your Switchboard.

Quick and painless, the import takes just a minute (or a little longer if you have a lot of posts and comments) and can be accessed via your Admin dashboard.

We are now working on a PHPBB importer, which is a lot more complex, and a Blogger importer. These should be available by the end of the week.

Please let me know if there are any other importers you would like to see.

Due to a number of requests for importing functionality from other services, we have suspended all development of any new features so that we can concentrate all our man power on building the planned import system and releasing it as soon as possible.

Initial support will be for Wordpress and PHPBB, but others will also be supported. We need to know what you want to import from, so please let us know in the discussion I created.

Over the last week or so, you may have noticed a number of smallish changes and new additions to your Switchboard. Most of these are small so you mau not have noticed. However, a few are worth mentioning:

1. Faster page loading

The number of templates that the back end has to parse has been reduced considerably, so you should see a marked improvement in the general loading of most pages.

1. Related Discussions

At the end of each blog or forum post you will now find a short list of discussions that directly relate to the discussion you are currently viewing. This is a great way of enticing your users to raed other discussions.

1. More Admin options and Space Aliases

A small number of new editable options have been added to the Admin Settings screen. The most important of which is the ability to change your Space Subdomain and also set a Space Alias. A Space alias is mentioned here. It basically allows you to use your domain instead of your Tooum subdomain.

1. Inline Filters

When viewing lists of discussions, whether it be blog, forum or both, you will now see a number of filtering options at the top of the page. You can filter by blog, forum and bookmarked discussions and can even use the Content Slider to chose how much of each post you actually want to view. Moving the slider will instantly change how much of the posts body of text is shown. So you can see quickly what the discussion is all about.

More are still to come. The next big feature to be implemented will be External Discussions. We are working on it right now and hope to have something for you by the end of the week.

As requested, we have implemented a new skin management system. This new system - accessible via your admin panel - lets you edit, create and delete skins for your Switchboard.

A skin is simply a CSS file that inherits the main Switchboard CSS file. This main CSS file is not editable, but any skin you create inherits its properties, so you can still edit any part of the CSS structure.

You can also publish your skin creations and mark them as public. This will let other Switchboard owners use your public skin and create new skins based off that skin.

Pretty cool, I know. So play around and let us know what you think.

A number of bug fixes have also been applied. Thankfully these were few and far between, and as of this post, we are unaware of any other bugs. But remember, if you find any, please let us know.

Stand by for further updates and new features.

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

As you can see we have gone live with Switchboard and the public beta is now open at http://tooum.com Please signup for your Switchboard. It is free and does not include any ads - for the time being.

If you want to know more about us and Switchboard, please visit our new main site at http://tooum.com

• We want to know what you think!
• We want to know what you want!
• We want to know what you like!
• We want to know what you don't like!

So please tell us so that we can make Tooum and Switchboard even better.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Switchboard is currently running in beta mode, which means that it is not quite perfect - yet! We have opened up the beta to the public to gage interest, collect feedback and remove all known bugs from the system. So we would greatly appreciate your help is doing this, by simply posting you comments, bug reports and feature requests right here.