Once you log in, you should see a menu bar at the top of your window that will show your notifications, your messages, and your profile. The forum menus work the same as before, they are just cleaner and easier to read.
In the forums, the text editor has been updated so its cleaner, faster, and easier to use. Quick reply, posting, and replying should all be easier now than ever before.
We've revamped the photo editor in your profile to make it easier and simpler to use. The first thing you'll notice is that if you've connected your forum account to Twitter and/or Facebook, you can quickly select to synchronize your photo with the service on the same page.
We're also using square cropped images for the user's photo for a more uniform feel and you can adjust the crop viewport if the default center crop doesn't catch all the detail.
There is a new "MY MEDIA" Button in the text editor so you can access all of the photos in your galleries and easily insert them into posts. Sharing photos and media has been simplified across the system. So now you can add a photo to your gallery, and with one click use it almost everywhere else in the forums. You can even drop blog posts into forum posts now.
You now have the ability to 'tag' content with special keywords and then find other content tagged with the same keywords. Tags can also be used as a post prefix. (We will be adding FOR SALE, WANTED, CRAIGSLIST, and EBAY tags to the system this evening so they are ready for use in the classified section.)
There is a new mobile skin for the forums so you can access the board from your mobile phone or tablet with a completely touch based interface.
The facebook and twitter integration has been improved as well. You can now log in using Facebook or Twitter and share topics from the system directly to Facebook and Twitter. The mobile theme also has full facebook and twitter functionality as well.
Member photos and member avatars have been merged into the same function now as they did the same thing. If you had a photo and no avatar, you will need to update your profile with your preferred avatar. (And you can edit photos right in the forum software to get it to look exactly like you want it to.)
The gallery has been updated with a new "portal" home page showing recent images and albums. The new gallery also automatically crops and resizes images to a square for use in thumbnails - this gives a clean and consistent view across the Gallery.
Some users however, prefer images not to be cropped. Therefore, we've added a setting to disable this.
When disabled, images will not be cropped and will be centered in a transparent square canvas - this allows the rows in the Gallery to remain consistent, but without cropping images.
There are some other additional features in the gallery:
- Stats (number of images, comments, etc.) is now on the gallery home page again - both the portal and browse views.
- We've removed the limit of 10 images at a time, you can now upload as many images as you like in one go.
- We've moved the slideshow button to a more prominent location, at the top of the page, next to the upload button.
Enjoy the system!
