Submitted by sam on Thu, 08/03/2006 - 16:00.
The site update is now complete, and is live. The update went relatively smoothly (except for a few annoyances listed below) and is ready to be used again. If you would like to read the history of this update, see this, this and this.
Read on for the full details including new features and known issues.
New Features
Here is a list of some of the new features of the site. This list is not all inclusive, as you will find many other features not listed here. This is intended more to give you a taste of what is here, rather than a complete list.
New forums and layout
If you look in the Forums section you will see a new layout for the forums here, as well as some new forums. The following new forums have been added:
- Static Coordination: This is a forum specifically for ClanAM members to use when coordinating their private statics. No posts from this forum are to be promoted to the front page, these are intended to be used for individual static members.
- Admin Notices: This will be where all future Administrative notices will be found (such as this one).
- Off Topic: This is where all future completely and totally off topic posts should go. Things like the pudding post and JP ONRY! will be found in this forum in the future.
- Flames & Rants: This is your general flames and rants forum. Nothing here should ever be placed on the front page, and people with faint hearts shouldn't dwell in here. Basically, unless you have a pretty thick skin, don't go here.
New Search
The new search functionality is quite improved. However, at present, not all of the site is searchable. See the known issues below.
Shorter URLs
Previously, all content on the site had some variation of the following URLs:
http://ffxi.clanam.org/node/view/###
http://ffxi.clanam.org/book/view/###
where '###' was some number used internally by Drupal.
With this new version of Drupal, the URLs are now truncated to simply:
http://ffxi.clanam.org/node/###
All old URLs will still work, and will be redirected to this new shorter one.
New Content Editing Features
There are many new features when you create new content or edit existing content. There are now AJAX-based features that allow for all kinds of cool and neat things.
Go create new content and check them out.
Known Issues
At this time (2006-08-03) we have a number of known problems with the current site:
Older polls only displays 15 recent polls
This is actually a known bug in Drupal. It's pretty silly, honestly, and someday maybe I'll submit a fix for it.
Search not searching all content
The new search engine pre-indexes the content for quick searching. The problem is we have a lot of content, and this indexing will take time.
As of right now (2006-08-03 @ 11:55am EDT) only about 47% of the previous content has been indexed.
This is a problem that will solve with time. A maintenance script runs every 30 minutes that indexes more content for the search feature. Eventually we will catch up and everything will be indexed.
I expect this may take upwards of 24 hours to completely index this site (unless you guys want me to take the site offline again and force it manually).
Minor CSS problems
At present, there a few minor CSS issues. I will work on these and fix them over the next week or so.
Avatars
I'm debating about enabling Avatars for posts. In my tests, I haven't managed to get them working yet. And even if I do get them working, I'm not sure we will really like them anyway. I'll hack away at this and see how it goes.
Comments? Issues?
If you have any comments or issues, or would like to report a problem with the site, please post them under this thread. Thanks.
Clothcraft guide error
Not sure if this is the correct place to place this comment, I believe it is.
In Raprot's Clothcraft guide the (< a ) is missing from all the links, from what I can see. The remainder of the link looks alright but it is missing that part of the hyper-link.
I was surfing the site and decided to see if the clothcraft guide had any pointers I could use when I'm back in game.
Yep
This is as good a place as any.
Yeah, of all the guides, Meretrix's/Raprot's are likely to be the most messed up since the update. Trix is a great guy, but knowledgable of web-standards he is not. Much of what he does is stuck in the web-design styles of 1995. The new Drupal seems to be both more forgiving to people who don't understand web-design at all (it inserts paragraph seperators in blank lines) and less forgiving to people who understand web-design a little bit.
Vis Maior's Journeys
http://maior.samhart.net/
Update to the update
Just four more updates:
1) The Poll problem mentioned above was fixed by Tabke/RavenclawX based on a suggested he made in IRC. Thanks Tabke.
2) Older posts that utilize "<br>" in them will now be essentially fucked up. This is because the new engine adds proper paragraph division to all posts (including previous ones). So, if you see an older post that has A LOT of extra space in it, you know why.
3) As of 8:35am EDT 2006-08-04, the search engine indexes are at 99% with only 3 posts left to index. So, the search engine can now be considered functional.
4) Thanks to roosterx/Thersities, a CSS problem with the thread navigation buttons at the bottom o the page could be mangled (See this) was fixed. Thanks roosterx.
Vis Maior's Journeys
http://maior.samhart.net/
Awesome !
The new site RULEZ! Well done Maior. Glad I could help in some small way.
Woot
Just wanted to say thanks again for all you do. And the new search features are the bomb, yo!
A lot of people don't know just how long you spent on this upgrade once the site went down. I was in IRC with you wh4en you did it though, and I want to share with everyone.
After the site went offline for the upgrade on Wed, Sam easily spent 12-14 hours over the next day getting this new site online. Much of which was spent with him being grouchy in IRC (lol) while he was trying to solve last minute problems. I helped where I could, but this upgrade was all him.
So next time you see Maior, thank him again for all he does lol!
RavenclawX/Ranger
![](http://warmech.net/special/classes/ff3/07-hunter.gif)
Sweet!!!!
Just wanted to give you big props for the site update.. looks nice!! ^^