phpBB Weekly

Well, phpBBWeekly.net was gone for pretty much the full day. I must admit, the site redesign took longer than anticipated, and indeed, I spent the whole day working on this thing. Considering the size of my to-do list, you can imagine that I wasn’t too pleased either.

However, the new phpBB Weekly website is about 95% complete. You’ll notice that it looks pretty similar–we are still using the same theme as we did before. We are, however, going to be getting a brand new header image for the site which is being designed by my same friend who did our album artwork, and that will be added when he gets it finished sometime this weekend. This, along with a few other backend tweaks, are some things that are yet to be done and make up the remaining 5% of the work.

In my opinion, the redesigned site looks a lot better and is much better organized. Gone is the huge home page with enough text on it to make any newcomer scream out loud. The blog itself now constitutes the front page of our website, and that big, red, impossible-to-miss box at the top is where the preview of the next episode is posted. There’s also a much shorter summary of the podcast and this website on the sidebar, but all of the other information has been moved onto our newly consolidated About and Participate pages.

We are now fully integrating tags into the website and all of the posts. This means that if you are interested in a particular topic, you can go to our Tags page and see all of the topics that have been mentioned on our show and on our blog. We also have a new archives viewer on the site as well. All of the posts now come with a ShareThis button so that you can easily share them with a friend or on a social networking site, and all of the comments are now Gravatar enabled. A number of other smaller changes have also been made to bring the site up-to-date with how far our podcast has come since this site was first launched almost eight months ago.

We hope you enjoy the site, and we’ll probably be talking a bit more about what’s new on phpBB Weekly #040 tomorrow. And of course, keep an eye on our website as we finish up the last few features and get them deployed. See you tomorrow for phpBB Weekly!