New Website Features to bring the Community together
9 Feb. 2016, 22.46
The Inkscape website has recently been updated, bringing our community a lot of new features to bring them closer together. While we were working on updating the website, we experienced some rough spots (slowness, unavailability), but hopefully, most of those have been evened out by the determined work of our team.
New features at a glance:
New Gallery
The new gallery now really makes our community's artwork shine. It's easy to browse and discover inspiring art and Inkscape add-ons created by other Inkscape users. You can sort by gallery, type of upload, age and other parameters and search for keywords.
Contests
There is now a mechanism in place that allows us to hold contests for artwork on our website. We expect to make use of this for community voting, e.g. the About Screen contests.
Teams
Users and developers, the Inkscape Board, as well as website editors and translators can now join their respective teams. Teams can have their own chat rooms, mailing lists and galleries to exchange ideas and images (the actual mailing lists will only be moved later from their current location at sourceforge). Chat access from our website is now only available to logged in users, which makes it possible that the people giving support can reach out to them even after they logged off from chat (of course, access to the chat channels is also possible using an IRC client software, just like before). There is also a new chat bot with a couple of fun features, and a chat tutorial for our users.
Releases
We have now got a new releases app, which will soon replace the current CMS downloads pages. It's being filled in step by step with all our old and current download files. If you can help write up and link up all the downloads, please get in touch. The new releases page will be made available to the public in the coming months.
Website Design
In many places, the design of the website has been updated and improved: the website footer, the user profile, as well as the CMS pages and many other locations all got a small brushing-up.
Mails
The website is now able to send other mails than just the registration mails to users. Currently, this new mailing system is used to alert you of private messages another user sends you, without exposing their private email address. You can now also follow any other user on the website, to be notified of new uploads to their gallery.
Translations
All menues in all languages are now complete, as missing, untranslated contents is filled in by its English fallback. All parts of the website are available for translation now.
Security
Our website software, Django, has been updated to the latest long term support version. This fixes a lot of vulnerabilites, while at the same time reducing the frequency of maintenance updates for our website developers.
Updates for Editors and Staff
Our editors and translators can now subscribe to pages, to get an email when those have been edited. The editing workflow and interface have been updated, and things like spell-checking now work directly while editing. There have also been changes made to the available plugins.
Bug fixes
Many small and big bugs were squashed during the months that preceded the current website release. For example, our planet blog aggregator is now working again. For a full list of changes, please refer to our website's release milestone page - and if you encounter any bugs we didn't address yet, please report them to our bug tracker.
