A lot of you guys have been asking about this, and I finally got it working. It doesn’t look super pretty yet, but it’s there!
I use a lot of stuff in the backend and up until now it probably would never have made any sense to anyone except for me – this is the first step in making it a little more user friendly.
So, this is one big update made up of a lot of little updates.
First of all, there’s an in-page login form now on the upper right.
This one should be pretty self explanatory. When you log in, it also shows you links to your profile and the page to add information to the database. That’s right!
Second, the backend, login, registration, and forgot your password pages all fit the site design now.
I’m not a designer, but at least we’ve got consistency! You can see that there are a couple selectable themes on your profile page, too, but right now only the orange one works for everyone. I’m open to a LOT of feedback on this one. Very very quick job on it, focusing mainly on keeping things working versus looking pretty.
The NEW CONTENT page is open to users now!
You can submit reviews or books to be added to the database. Everything might be a little confusing at first, but there’s a big ol’ Pre-Publish reminder to the right of the post box that should help you on your way a little bit. We’ll be tweaking this a lot in the upcoming months, I’m sure, until it’s as easy as possible to use while still being able to contain a lot of information.
You don’t HAVE to add books to the database or submit reviews – it just seemed like a lot of you wanted to. Now you can! Make sure that your profile page is filled out first with any information you want site viewers to see when they click on your name – I want everyone to be able to get credit for their hard work.
We are currently only seeking new books in the DC Universe list (to help me catch any I might have missed) and the Self Contained list (to help populate the Creator tag lists. All the other books have to be added in specific orders, and the main orders aren’t set yet, so we don’t need help to fill in gaps there. Self Contained is going to be huge, and sorted alphabetically, so those can be added any time.)
LESS ADVERTISING
All this new good stuff and LESS ads? Well, I didn’t like the way the adsense ads look, so their off every page except for the Google Search page. That’s the only way we can get that feature for free, and believe me, we can’t afford it. Having it, though, takes a lot of load off the server by keeping the search queries to google’s cached crawl data. In any case, there will probably be some news about how upcoming sponsorship and affiliate stuff will work on this site, but I’m only looking for things that will help the user experience, not distract from it. Adsense wasn’t really working there.
Alright, so that’s everything in this update. Not too much detail on the stuff, but go explore – you can’t break anything (at least you really really really shouldn’t be able to) so go ahead and make a draft of a post or something. Feel free to tinker around and let me know what you think (and what needs to be done better!)
