Today is a momentous day in Woolie’s World history. The next (and more permanent) layout has been released, which I personally think looks a lot better than the old one. There are quite a few improvements to the back-end of this site as well, which unfortunately don’t have much effect on you, but I feel a lot happier fully knowing the code that it’s running on. Ok, so heres a run down of the new features.

The Features

As you may have noticed, a few more features are viewable now. Although there are not as many currently, there certainly will be more (I intend to actively develop this version, rather than have it sit here until a new version is released.)

New Shoutbox

If you take a look over to the right navigation bar, you will see that there is a little tab named “shouts”, give it a click and shout some happy phrases.

New Styling

You may have noticed from viewing this post that there is a new look to the posts on Woolie’s World. Although this post may seem a little too “over-styled”, thats just because I’m trying to fit in the nice and happy looking new styled text.

Less Cluttered Navigation

In previous versions, I have just tended to shove everything in the navigation column, which isn’t very nice. So now I’ve migrated various things to other places (LOOK AT THE SHWEXY FOOTER). As mentioned just now, the tags and little about section has moved to the footer, along with a list of the posts which have been commented on most recently. The search box has now moved into it’s own little drop-down box on the right hand navigation, and the pages have moved to the header.

Improved Gallery

Whilst looking at the API statistics on Flickr, I noticed just how much my gallery was being looked at. This is why in this version I have taken a little time and made it look a bit more pretty and uniform with the rest of this site.

New Avatar & Author Pictures

This is what has taken the time in my development progress, I have written my own homegrown plugin to manage the avatars for this site. This is because I wasn’t quite happy with the plugin I was using. This current one, every ten minutes will check to see if any new avatars have been uploaded, and if they have, will upload them to the Woolie’s World Media Server (media.woolie.co.uk) via and FTP stream. This allows me to monitor bandwidth more effectively, and generally makes Woolie a lot happier. As a consequence, you will have to re-upload your avatars, as the previous plugin would not let me access the folder in which they were stored (something about symbolic links I think).

I’m sure I’ve missed some features out of that list, but hey I’m trying to get this post written quickly. Anyway, let me know what you think of this version. Anything else you would like to see on it?