First up, I'd like to thank everyone who has been providing feedback on the PH re-design. As lead developer, I'm trying to factor it all in to our development and prioritize fixes and improvements based on what people are asking for. We went through quite a bit of internal testing before unleashing the new PH for community testing a week prior to launch. Even so, various bugs have been spotted since we launched, both by the PH community and the team. Many are fixed, some are still in our bug tracker.
Some of the more visible things that have been improved in the week or so since the launch include:
- Restoring printer friendly mode in various articles where it had gone missing
- The submissions area now lists the status of your resources
- You can now edit the way that your submissions are tagged, to help make them more findable in the resource directory
- New resources now show up in "tag feeds", so get more promotion on tag start pages
- Tag pages now show synonyms for a tag, where we have them available
- Made corners of homepage boxes a bit thinner, to make it a bit less "heavy", plus added links to user page of latest blog posts. Ah, and some pretty colorful icons.
- Fixes to the color and font size controls in the dropdowns in the editor for blog and forum posting
This is in addition to many, many other behind-the-scenes fixes and improvements, meaning you should get faster page load times and allowing us to run things more smoothly. A lot of the changes we have made are a direct result of comments from Programmer's Heaven users, so thanks to everyone who gave this feedback, and please do keep it coming!
Finally, I'd like to apologize for it being so long since the last time I wrote an "Inside PH" blog entry. The months when we were working away on the re-design were incredibly busy for me, both working to bring you the new PH along with the rest of the PH team and also with work on the Perl 6 compiler, another big project I hack on. I hope to write much more soon, including lessons from the development of the new PH, some of the techniques we're using and how we tackled some of the challenges we faced.
As always, happy hacking, and I hope the re-design and subsequent fixes and improvements are making Programmer's Heaven feel more heavenly.
