New Galleries Section Launched

Site and forum news announced on the front page.

New Galleries Section Launched

Postby Thoul » Tue May 4, '10, 1:06 am

The new Galleries are now available for browsing. I said previously that I was going to install these tomorrow, but frankly, I was impatient after working on it for so long. ;) Both the old game and fan art image galleries have been replaced by this new format, which has many additional and improved features. There are also some other changes around the site as side result of the Galleries launching.

First, let me detail the other changes. The site menu at the top of each page has changed to a more compact selection of links. This fixes some display issues in more recent versions of the Opera browser as well as making the menu easier to use at smaller screen sizes. The old Chat Archive and Private Chat Archive links can now be found below their matching shoutbox/chatroom display. Some of the old Help links (Contact, Privacy, Guidelines, etc.) are now at the bottom of each page.

The layout of the front page of the site has changed as well. The shoutbox is now included on that page. The Puzzles and Fan Art blocks have been removed. They'll be appearing in the randomly rotated Featured block later on. The game logo scroll section is also improved to highlight the currently selected game. The page should generally load more quickly also, due to some internal optimizing.

Finally, the Links page has been updated. Some Official Site urls were corrected and Between Worlds was removed, as it seems to have disappeared from the web. :(

Now, as for the Galleries. In the new Galleries, you can more easily browse by both product (game, book, magazine, so on) and category. Each list can also be sorted by various options, to make it easier to spot new images.

The detailed view of an image has some new features, also. Extra large images will be automatically resized for easier viewing. The image resizing controls on the pages, recently broken by some browser updates, now resize correctly again. BBCodes for linking to an image's details page are provided, as well. For images that fit the allowed width and height sizes of community avatars, a "Make This My Avatar" button will appear. This includes images that aren't in the Avatar Gallery but still fit in the size limits.

Members can also submit fan art and original art to appear in the Galleries now. More details on this will come later in the Artwork forum. In the Image of the Day forum, each topic's image (or thumbnail, for large images) can now be seen in the forum view. This will also apply to member submitted images, which will have matching topics in the Artwork forum.

Some images are currently sorted in the wrong categories, due to limitations of the old system. I'm aware of this and working on moving them to more appropriate categories. I have do to it one at a time, so it will take a little while.

Also, the art submitted to the old fan art section has not yet been transferred over to the new Galleries. I'm going to be doing that during the next few hours.

As with any large site change like this, there is a chance I might have missed a problem. If anyone find any issues with the functioning of the new Galleries, let me know and I'll look into it.
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Re: New Galleries Section Launched

Postby Thoul » Tue May 4, '10, 5:24 am

All of the images from the old fan art section have now been transferred to the new Galleries.
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Re: New Galleries Section Launched

Postby Thoul » Tue May 4, '10, 7:12 pm

A new Galleries Guide help page has been added. It has info about how to submit images. Size limits have also been added to the posting form, so you can see how big images are allowed to be when submitting. And most important of all, there's a New Topic button in the Galleries for easy submissions from that area.
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