We recognise that one of the most important things about any forum or blog solution, is that it must be as customisable as possible. We already provide you with a skinning feature that lets you customise the look and feel of your Switchboard using CSS templates. And now, you can customise your SB even further with fully cutomisable templates.

Switchboard is built using the very popular and very fast Smarty Templating Engine and so we are passing on this power to you. Although SB uses several templates, there is one main template that is used on every page. This is the template that controls the layout and is also the template that you can now customise to your hearts content.

This means that you can now add additional HTML and javascript to your SB. Adding further content such as your Del.icio.us links and your Flickr photos. You can even add items to the main menu in your SB, perhaps linking back your main site, or to other interesting Blogs and forums.

It also uses the same principles as the skinning system, in that you can create a new template based off the system default, or just create a new empty template. You can also mark any of your templates as public, which will allow other SB owners to use and modify that template and make it their own. And of course, you can do the same with their public templates.

We have also pushed out a few smaller tweaks to your Switchboard, including:

• The navigation menu is now a little smaller, taking up less room on the page.
• Spam comments are now easier to manage. You will see a notice at the top of the page if you have any spam comments. Clicking on that link will show you all the those comments and let you mark them as spam or ham.
• Content selection on the filter bar now saves its state as part of your session

And as requested, we have posted a simple list of upcoming features soon to be implemented into Switchboard. This list will be updated when a listed feature is implemented and when we come up with a new feature. You can find it under the navigation menu on ever page of this Switchboard.

We hope that this new found power does not go to your head, but if it does... enjoy it!

Seeing as Switchboard is ticking along nicely now and we are on top of the bug list, I wanted to give you a brief taster of upcoming features that we are already working on. These should be implemented within the next few weeks.

• External discussions

Using a small piece of javascript code that you place on any page of your site (or any site for that matter) external to SB, your site visitors can comment on that page directly within that page, and without leaving that page. All past and present comments can be displaying inline on the page, and will also be shown on your SB as a new external discussion.

I hope I described that without confusing you all, but we are still grinding out the fine details of this one. But I believe it to be the most exciting.

• Auto created discussions from feeds

By simply adding any valid RSS/ATOM feed link, a discussion will be started on your SB. The starting post will be the feed post. Users of your SB can then replay and post comments on that feed. Then whenever a new item is detected on that feed, a new discussion is created.

• User icons/avatars
• Whispers / private messaing system
• Feedburner integration

PLUS loads more...

If you have any ideas for new or existing features, please post away.