New Round Of Upgrades Coming Soon

[shavethewhales]

Just a heads up - the site will be undergoing another revampment soon, though this won't be so much of a big deal as the last time. As we've discussed in the suggestions forum, this upgrade is all about cleaning up the site and fixing the numerous IE browser bugs. There'll be a new template, the user features will be laid out better and easier to use, and it will be much easier to see the important content on the home page. I'll also probably get around to changing a few forums styles as well, getting rid of the grass and adding some SDC stuff, as well as some more interaction with the main site.

So if you see the site suddenly stuck between two templates, don't worry. I'm going to wait till I have most of it done, but I'm itching bad enough to get this new template up that I may jump the gun and start adding it before it's all ready - just like the last 6 upgrades.

[Coaster]

^It'll be sad to see the grass go. So this upgrade is mostly just fixing what needs to be fixed from last time? It sounds like something we are in need of.

[History Buff]

Time to mow the grass!

[KBCraig]

Let me add my appreciation that you keep this a lean-and-fast site. I see way too many forums that seem to think everyone has the latest-and-greatest hardware, and are running Windows and IE.

Hint for other administrators: if your site requires, or even "works best with" IE or Windows, your site is broken. Fatally broken. If you wrote it with FrontPage and host it on a Windows server, your future as an admin is fatally broken.

And if anyone is curious why this is an issue for me, it's because I use Firefox in a 9 year old Mac running 10.4. I have no problem on well-designed sites, but others are unusable.

[shavethewhales]

^Thanks, it's good to see that someone understands the value of Firefox.


Anyway, the new layout is now up. You'll probably have to refresh your browser several times or reset your cache file in order to get all the new images to display correctly.

There's still a LOT to do for this upgrade though. I've shut off the profiles and user features for now, but they'll be back soon better than ever. I've also started to work on cleaning a few things up - check out the new videos page for an example of how the news, galleries and events pages will soon be handled.

Let me know if you encounter any bugs. Everything should be perfect for IE7, Firefox, and Safari, but keep in mind that I've officially thrown out support for IE6.

Oh yeah - I know the banner is old; I'll change it out tonight.

[Coaster]

^Looks great Steve. Everything I've looked at so far is working great right now. The home page is so much easier to look at for information now.

[sdcforever]

^^The main site looks and feels great, Steve!  Navigating it is so smooth!

[shavethewhales]

There's actually one bug that I haven't been able to fix: if you click the 'All News' tab on the home page the latest forum posts are out of place. I'll get to it soon.

Aside from that, here's my checklist for this upgrade (so I don't forget anything):

• Add profiles to main site
• Revamp user features to be easier to use, more visible
• Add paging to events, galleries, news, and videos pages (see videos page for example)
• Sort events, galleries, news, and videos by park
• Add drop down navs, maybe a side tree navigation
• Add photo galleries for each individual ride
• Fix up ride and attractions bio pages, add more
• Make another attempt to have a color-coded calendar showing events and expected crowd levels
• Clean up the forums (mow the grass, add boxes to show latest headlines, photos, events)

As usual, I'm doing all of this at my own pace, so it will be a long time before it's all done.

[saladdays]

Hint for other administrators: if your site requires, or even "works best with" IE or Windows, your site is broken. Fatally broken. If you wrote it with FrontPage and host it on a Windows server, your future as an admin is fatally broken.

Yes. You should build it with both in mind (FF because it's a good browser, and IE because a majority of people still use it). It sometimes is difficult to make websites look good in both, but it's usually possible.

[marolinesdad]

I love the new main Site.  It is so easy to find everything.  Thanks for all the hard work you put into this site.

[shavethewhales]

Hmmm, it may be a while before the user features are back on in full... I pretty much need to completely re-do the way the site tracks users. The login/logout from the main site has never really worked right, and it should really be taken care of now before it gets to hard to go back and fix. Plus there are some more bugs that are popping up in Chrome and IE7 that I didn't know about.

Once it's all done though, the main site should be a lot more entertaining. Hopefully I can find a way to get more content flowing in, and maybe a few other people will volunteer to help post some news once in a while.

[shavethewhales]

Forget what I said in the last post for now. The user features are back up, but they're VERY clunky and probably still full of a few bugs. Still, if you have some photos or something you really want to add, it'll be awhile before I can totally re-vamp the system.

I also fixed the links in the news box, and the editorials are back up.

[History Buff]

For the past several days, I've had to log in twice to get on (whether on the main site or on the forums).  Maybe this is why we haven't been seeing much activity lately - if folks don't try to log in twice they may not be getting on.

[shavethewhales]

I'm probably just going to take down the main site login - it's never worked right because of the way I tried to force it into the forums system rather than using the side scripts that were provided. As for the forums, I've noticed a few bugs popping up when you try to mark all messages as read just after signing in, so I'll probably have to download some new files to copy over the changes I made.

I'll try to get this taken care of pretty quick, but this of course means that all of the user features will disappear for an unknown amount of time. I really need to get on the ball with this - who knows how many users have been scared away by all the bugs on the main site. I'm just too lazy 

[marolinesdad]

On the main site several things are not working. 

Shop is down all the way.  It does nothing.

Videos has this error.  Fatal error: Call to undefined function: ssi_recentposts() in /home/content/s/h/a/shavethewhales/html/videos.php on line 64....

Photo's has this error.  Fatal error: Call to undefined function: ssi_recentposts() in /home/content/s/h/a/shavethewhales/html/gallery.php on line 171

Under SDC info the only one that works is SDC History

Under CC info the only thing that works is CC History

Contact does not function.

Not complaining but thought you needed to know.