My site is private now because I am overhauling the site and there will be a massive change in content IDs. There are two things wrong with the site. 1. The database is corrupt due to several years worth of some addons not uninstalling itself properly and 2. We do not have enough spam protective measures in place to prevent Baidu search engine spiders from using up the site's resources and bandwidth. Number 2 is easy to fix. I can just buy a spam addon but that fix would be temporary. To solve number 1, I will import 8thos to another Xenforo 1.2 installation using the Xenforo 1.2 to XF 1.2 importer whenever that is officially released. When this happens 8thos will not retain the same thread, posts, profile posts, conversations and user ids but at least urls will be shorter and look prettier and the database will be cleaner.
I have decided to use XenMediaGallery 1.3 to put both our blogs, albums and videos in one place because almost everything that's needed for blogging is already present in XenMediaGallery. Categories are organized perfectly in the sidebar, their are more user permissions which is especially needed to handle any privacy issues that may come up and if
RSS features are introduced into XenMediaGallery at some point or another (and it probably will since RSS is also a feature in Gallery sites such as Picassa and Flicker), linking our albums, videos and blogs RSS to our site's Twitter and Facebook through Google Feedburner will be more convenient than before.
So in a nutshell, Albums, Blogs, Videos and Showcase (Featured Blogs) will be in one section called Media. Like Featured Blogs (Showcase), XMG also has star ratings that will show up in search results and also has thumbnail widgets which will make it more cooler and easier to show off our albums, vids and blogs (think 'featured images' for wordpress or bobster's Showcase addon).
Why blogs, you may ask? Well after discovering that I can embed smilies and video in 'Add Caption' and that up to 15,000 characters are allowed in
XenMediaGallery, I have decided to hire a coder to import Better Blogs to threads so that we can import those threads to XenMediaGallery with a thread importer. This thread importer will also be used to import our Showcase to XenMediaGallery (because our showcase comments are already threads and the first post of that thread can be the actual showcase item itself). If a Showcase has extra pages that exceed character limit it will be added manually as an extra item blog item's 'XMG user album'.
You can read more about my XMG customization project here:
http://xenmediagallery.com/threads/add-captions-mini-blogs.404/
Screenshot: