Over the past week and a half we've made some updates to the GameDev.net site that have been pretty highly requested issues to address. This entry will be relatively short and is intended to present some of the updates we have made.
[size="5"]Recent Updates
The biggest change you should notice is the site header, which has been redesigned to make it much more uniform and compact. Most of the header (outside of search) is CSS-based so it should load much quicker than the old jQuery version. People also complained that it takes too many clicks to get to your favorite parts of the site, so this approach reverted to the old Gamedev.net style of menu where the dropdown appears on mouseover.
While there a lot of little things that we have done over the past week, here are some of the more major items:
Improvements:
- Search fixed! Well, for the most part. You can now search the forums and it will return correctly ordered results
- View New Content fixed! VNC now shows you content that is also correctly paged and ordered
- Article CSS improvements - older articles looked incredibly bad from a styling standpoint, so we reset the CSS for articles and dropped in a default styling that would make them much more readable to users
- All dropdowns outside of search are now uniform and appear on mouseover
- CSS-based solution, so no need to wait on scripts to make all the menus work
- IE issue with difficulty keeping menu active no longer an issue
- 1024x768 browser resizing now works without removing ad
- Pathway to forums now can be done in just one click
- More compact and faster page loading[size="5"]
What's coming up?
Right now we have a lot of content buried in "archives" that is very tough to reach. We've going to be developing a site categorization scheme that is only two levels deep that all site content will be adhering to. With the upcoming IPS software update - we're also going to be able to incorporate a slew of additional features. One of our biggest features we're excited about is the addition of tagging to everything. This particular rollout is going to be phased in and will start with the 3.2 Invision Power Board software update. Our hope is that the combination of categorization and tagging will start to expose much more information you care about.
Over the next month we will be focusing on the Image of the Day, source code tags, and fixing a lot of the article problems that have crept up since our new site update. Since Game Development encompasses so much we're also looking to expand the content we offer to include a much more diverse range of articles that you may not be used to seeing on GameDev.net. One of the key players in this change will be you, as beginning to pull in a larger set of articles will require much more moderation than even our extensive and talented staff of moderators can handle. Because of this, we'll be looking to include a larger number of regularly active and highly regarded community members to participate in deciding what you want to see on our web site. We'll have more details to follow on this in the future.
That's all for this Tuesday update so thanks for reading! For a list of new features to look out for you can also check out the Invisionpower.com site here:
http://community.inv...ard-320-so-far/
