WeenieCampbell.com
The Unwound Third => Site Announcements, Tips & Trouble Reports => Topic started by: uncle bud on November 21, 2011, 09:24:07 AM
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Hello all. Here are a few tips for getting a little more out of the new software features for the Weenie site.
1) Collapsing header, columns and site information blocks. You can adjust the amount of screen space taken up by various components of the site by collapsing or expanding some parts:
- The header with the Weenie logo at the top of your screen now has a small chevron icon ^ on the right side. Clicking this will collapse or expand the top portion of the site display.
- In the Forum view, there is a small (tiny!) graphic icon of a dash/minus sign [-] just above the right side of the Quote Generator. Clicking this will collapse the left hand menu, if you would like more screen space to display forum posts. Clicking the plus symbol + it turns into will expand the menu back. On the site's front page, there is a second tiny icon that will collapse the right hand column containing Who's Online, Weenie Stats etc., as well.
- The headings for Site Information Blocks like User Info, Main Menu, Weenie Juke, etc., also contain dash icons for collapsing and expanding these blocks. You may not want to see your User Info but may like to have the Main Menu easily accessible. Go nuts.
2) Drop-Down Search Box. In the old forum, we had a useful add-on, a drop-down search box appearing at the top right of each forum page. This allowed you to search the forum, search the current board, or most usefully, search within the current topic. So in a 35-page thread on Alan Lomax recordings, you could easily find the one reference to Crap Eye that you were looking for. The old add-on was not available in the new version of the forum software, but a replacement is now integrated into the collapsing site header. If you want to search within a topic, just make sure to expand the top header and you will see the drop-down search box. [edit, Rivers: a contextual search has now been added to the left menu]
3) Tag Index and Tag Cloud. We now have two menu items for Tags. One is the Tag Index, the equivalent of our old and venerable indexed tag feature. The other is Tags Cloud, which features a more standard tag cloud for youngsters, as well as a list of recently tagged posts.
4) Expandable Message Input Box. The box that you type into when you post or reply is now expandable and shrinkable. Look for the double line at the bottom of the input box that you can drag up or down to resize the box. Good for long posts when you would like to see more of your draft text at once. I am using it right now for this post.
We're still discovering hidden features and will let you know as we become enlightened. Let us know if you have any questions.
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2) Drop-Down Search Box. In the old forum, we had a useful add-on, a drop-down search box appearing at the top right of each forum page. This allowed you to search the forum, search the current board, or most usefully, search within the current topic.
And I forgot to add widen the search to Google. Don't know if this is new or not, but I hadn't noticed it before.
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5) Weenie Chat Room. The newly upgraded site allows us to configure some nice forum modifications. We have added Ajax Chat, a real time Chat Room. You will notice a new Chat button at the top forum menu. The number of members in Chat will be displayed next to the menu option, like thus: Chat(3). Members in Chat are listed at the bottom of the main forum index under the Users Online portion of the WeenieCampbell.com Info section.
When you click Chat you will have a pop out chat window that you can move and resize however suits you. There are a number of channels (or chat rooms) corresponding to our forum board names and also the main channel, Public. There are also options to have a private chat, the ability to invite an online member into chat and many others. There are a number of styles to choose from and until we modify one to match our Weenie theme, we recommend Beige as the closest style.
We're not sure if Weenies are chat room chatters, but we thought we'd add the option in the interest of enhancing our great member community.
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5) Weenie Chat Room.
We're not sure if Weenies are chat room chatters, but we thought we'd add the option in the interest of enhancing our great member community.
Well I logged in, saw a few names in a list, scratched my head wondering what to do next and rapidly left. This is probably one giant step too far for this Neanderthal, I'll stick with that which doesn't challenge me. ::)
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I predict weenie chat will catch on. It may not happen overnight, but it will happen... ;)
Perseverance furthers.
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Since the upgrade frenzy of a couple of weeks ago we've been tidying up and fixing minor issues behind the scenes.
Many of the graphics, including icons and backgrounds, have been reworked. We recommend you refresh your browser to be sure you're seeing the latest, corrected versions.
On most browsers just press F5 to refresh. Or click on the browser's little circular arrow button up at the top, next to where the website URL appears.
Also, there was a slight problem in the tagging department. The new version was forcing tags added to topics later to be all lower case. This has been fixed.