This iteration of the latest site update is mostly behind us, and (if all goes well) we will be focusing on the software for the remainder of the year. Here are a few final notes on the new site:
- Due to popular request, we've reinstated the Developer Central page. There is a new section at the top for new users, including some writeups about the software and site. In particular, the <a href=http://www.byond.com/developer/articles/whitepaper>BYOND Whitepaper by <a href=http://www.byond.com/members/forumaccount>Forum_account fills a much-needed void of information for prospective developers.
- We've consolidated similar forums. Code Problems + Dev How-to == Developer Help, and we merged the gaming forums into a single section, which will be aggressively moderated for lack of content and spam. We've added a new read-only Announcments forum for posts like these, and moved the bloggy community forums back to the bottom where they belong.
- We've updated the search to use a more intuitive system. Instead of a global search bar (which previously returned ambiguous results), there are individual search bars in the games, dev, and forum pages, whose scope is restricted to games, resources, and posts, respectively. The forum search searches over everything in the current forum group (eg: the entire BYOND Forums) by default, but you can override this on the results page to only search in the current forum (eg: "Developer Help") or across all posts in the entire BYOND space (which includes visible hub forums).
- We've changed some minor site behavior, colors, and layout. Notably, we've gotten rid of the subforum headers in favor of the older-style "all forums" listings. We replaced the pager-popup system with a direct link in many places. We updated the web pager to allow paging to non-friends, and also changed the styles of the pager discussions.
So hopefully this is "good enough" for now! We've put a heck of a lot of work into the design and implementation of this new site, and think it will be a big improvement for new and old users alike.
Now onto the backlog of bugs and fun software features!