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.