OK ladies...I have a bit of time to write some stuff down about the forthcoming upgrade, so figured I should let you all in on whats going on!
Over the last few months work has been progressing slowly but surely on the DC website upgrade. We had a bit of a lull whilst I was dealing with some personal things, but now I am back and steaming ahead full power with everything and well...it's coming along fantastic!
What's New?: (The 3 most important things so far)- The move from static HTML to a full CMS
This is obviously the biggest and most important thing and the reason DC is going to be so much easier to keep updated in the future. This gives
- Updated website search function (via the website, not the forum - VERY powerful)
Fairly self explanatory so I will leave this at this.
- User based article submission/hosting (One of the things I'm most excited about!)
FINALLY! We now have a way people can write big articles (like the software shootouts, or the full reviews and such) and actually have them featured in a hugely prominent way, and with a fantastic selection of layouts to make them look awesome!
Along with this come a lot of behind-the-scenes changes as well as some funky stuff for people to see and use (don't want to give too much away at this point and really...everything is still subject to change). We of course kept things like the Live Chat and other fairly well used areas, but there a lot of old pages which are simply going to be archived (They practically never get visited and would hold up the release date potentially by weeks, so they are coming to the CMS...but in a VERY basic format and won't really be highlighted in any way. Perhaps those pages will be added in a better way at a much much MUCH later stage (IE: Once we work out all the kinks, the upgrade is complete and released, and I have recovered from a meltdown) but for now.....no.
Gotta give a huge shout-out to mouser as well because although from these posts it may seem like it's only me doing things, mouser is actually doing the CSS magic as well as some other major stuff (Pages that utilize the forum user information {license page and such}) as well as keeping the current site/forum up and running and also keeping his software as up to date and as bug free as he possibly can. I take as much work away from him as I can when it comes to the CMS so he doesn't have a nervous breakdown before I do!!
Again...No release date or ETA as of yet, but what I can say is that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel...and it looks GOOD!
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