Site Changes 4th March 2012

[gabba]

By now you will have seen that some of the changes we have been working on behind the scenes have made their way to the live forum. This post will provide you with the details of those changes

New Layout
By far the most obvious change is the new layout. Essentially we have added a left hand column to the forum, that makes the site more "website like"as opposed to a straight forum. The content of the left hand panel has been chosen to reflect the more popular areas of the site - thereby allowing you quicker access to the latest information on the site - such as photos, and latest posts

Choice of Themes
We've also added a theme chooser to the left hand side panel. Essentially there are two themes - one that contains a few more graphics, is more feature rich,  but is slightly larger to download. The other is more along the lines of what you have seen previously on the forum. Feel free to choose whichever one you like / wish to use.

Flickr Gallery
We have a link on the forum now to our own flickr gallery. To put pictures in the Flickr gallery, you will need to sign up to Flickr and then share those photos with the group (the group is called nzlocalweather_grp). The only restriction on what you can put in the gallery is under Flickr's T's and C's (bearing in mind though that it is a publicly shared group, and there are people of all ages and tastes accessing it via the NZ Local weather forum and elsewhere)

To get to the Flickr gallery from within the Forum, you will see there is a child board set up under the Photography board. So either go to the photography board and click on the child board, or click on the child board directly from the main forum page

The Shoutbox
Last but by no means least you will see a new shoutbox in place. Testing seems to indicate that this one doesn't suffer from the same timeout issues as our old one. It also has a very helpful feature, whereby you can look at the history of posts, by clicking in the clock icon.

A big thanks to JennyLeez, Iomkiwi and Tokww who helped with all the changes, and the testing in the background. We're excited to bring these changes to you, and hope that you will find them useful.

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