Updates, Tweaks and Members Settings OR Pascal Sites Unite!
by
, 29-09-2010 at 07:41 PM (10598 Views)
Besides a homage to Rocky & Bullwinkle, I just wanted to give everyone an update on a few things that have been going on in the background since we kicked-off the new site. Since we've came back and set up shop there have been a few essential tweaks and configuration issues that have come to our attention. So lets discuss them in a bit of detail so everyone knows whats going on.
NOTE: Should you find ANY issues, tweaks or errors, please don't hesitate to contact us or post about it. We will do our best to find a solution once we know about the problem. Until then, we only know what you tell us. Thanks
Navigation Issues
We've been going through some of the site settings to fix missing bits here and there and to try to tweak some defaults that we believe don't belong that way. First, Christina helped me find the pagination option for the News and Articles section, so you can now browse older news posts. Second, we cannot find the setting to change the default amount of time to show older threads when looking in a specific forum. It is currently set to 'Last Day' which I believe should be set a bit longer back due to long posting periods and it makes the forums look pretty barren. We are still looking, but if anyone has knowledge of where this setting it in vBulletin, please pass us a note. Third and last, I have not put a lot of categories for 'Article' section articles because I would like to wait and see what we need before I go and dump a whole bunch of useless categories that will never be used. Any suggestions or requests I'll be more than willing to add what you need on a case-per-case basis.
WYSIWYG Editing for CMS Articles, Blogs and Forums
From what I can tell, the only WYSIWYG editor you get by default is the one in the Forums. Unfortunately there isn't an override setting that we can set to give you all the WYSIWYG editor for editing/creating a new news posts, blog or article. You have to do the leg work for this yourself. However, it's not that hard to do thankfully. All you need to do is the following...
1. Go to your 'Settings' page by clicking on the 'Settings' link at the very top-right of the site page.
2. Once at this page you'll be able to alter all your settings from the left hand column. Look in the 'My Settings' box under the 'My Account' header and click on 'General Settings'. This will take you to a new page.
3. On this page scroll down to the very last heading 'Miscellaneous Options.' Here you are looking for the 'Message Editor Interface:' setting. Change it from Basic or Standard Editor to 'Enhanced Interface - Full WYSIWYG Editing' and click on the 'Save Changes' button below.
4. Test it out by going to the Home page and create a new article. You should see the full and proper editor above your content textbox.
Updates
There are some useful updates to vBulletin that have come out and are coming out soon. I'll be doing a software upgrade sometime this weekend to 4.0.7 which fixes a bug that generates a MySQL error when assigning attachments to CMS articles. There is also the 4.0.8 update that is due to come out on Monday next week. I'll have to see what will be the significance of those bug fixes, because the 4.1.0 update is due to come out sometime early in October. I'd like to limit the site's downtime so I'm planning only to upgrade to 4.0.7 in the meantime. I'll look further into when these other updates will be out and only apply updates where there is a need. If you notice any bugs of errors with the site please inform me of the error and track as much information as you can. So far the only issue is the attachments, but after 4.0.7, this will no longer be a problem.
Pascal/Indie Developer Site Affiliations
Since a couple of years ago, we have lost contact with some of our close affiliations, I believe that his may have hurt us in making like-minded people aware of who we are and what we're about. I believe that it's time to rekindle these relationships that we had as a greater community and I'd like to contact them as well as new community sites to see where we can't keep a better flow of information between the lot of us. I think this will help improve the interest of not only our site, but of that of the sites we affiliate with. In doing so, this may create a position on the staff to co-ordinate between sites and look for new affiliates. If anyone is interested in doing this or would like to help part time, please contact me via PM or post your email address and we'll talk. This will do a lot of good for the longevity of the site and Pascal and independent development community as a whole.
That's all for now, however I have still to address the Staffing issue here at PGD. We could use the help in making this place more lively so if you are interested please contact us and let us know your interest. I'd love to plan a chat or meeting to discuss opportunities to assign small tasks to keep activity here flowing the way we would like it. All of this is of course voluntary so there is no major obligation, just folks helping folks keep organized. More on this to follow.
Have a great day!