Four Island

Finally. It's finally here. The new Four Island....

Well everyone, I hope you enjoy the new Four Island! It was quite a lot of work to put together! How about I start by enumerating the new features?

The blog has many new Wordpress-esque features even though it isn't Wordpress. I've written a Related Posts module that searches for other posts that could possibly be related and shows you the top 5. There's a Popular Posts module that gives each post a Popularity score that can be increased by reading it, commenting on it, and most importantly, giving it pingbacks.<!--more-->

Speaking of Pingbacks, yes! The Pingback support is finally here! And, peoples, just to test out this newfound Pingback support, I would appreciate it if someone Pingbacked this post. You know, add a link to this post in a post on your blog. Thanks in advance to anyone who does this!

Another great new feature. Anonymous commenting has finally been re-enabled! But, rather like Wordpress, you must have your comment moderated before it can appear. But after you've had one comment moderated, any others using your same Anonymous Username and Email will automatically appear.

The Popular Posts module has also added a Thumbs-Up Thumbs-Down method of rating a post. This way, you can support the post without writing a comment. However, a post won't get as many popularity points from rating than commenting, and it is possible to negatively rate a post.

One of my favorite new features (though I don't quite know why) is the usage of slugs. No you lollipop licker, I'm not talking about slimy little molluscs, I'm talking about the method of writing pathnames. Let me elaborate. If I had a blog post called.... say.... "The New Four Island". The equivalent slug would be "the-new-four-island". And thus, it's path would be: "http://www.fourisland.com/blog/the-new-four-island/". It's a newer (and better) method of naming paths than URLEncoding them as the old Four Island did.

That gets me onto the Wiki. The Wiki system has been completely rewritten. And guess what, it uses slugs as well. It also has Page History support so if there are bad people doing bad things, an admin can go look at the past and revert.

Also, while I've written the new Wiki, I haven't moved the old Wiki to the new Wiki. I'd like some people to help me do so. I'll release a link to the new Wiki in a couple of posts, kay?

Fourm time. Well, the Fourm is muchly the same as ever, but due to being included in a strange fashion, the Fourm has a couple of bugs now that I'd like to resolve. First of all, when logging in, registering or searching, the page looks really hideous and has other information at the bottom. Another thing, clicking on the "Fourm" button at the top logs you out. Please stand by these errors while I try to resolve them, kay?

The Poll is pretty much the same, except for the new rendering model that has gripped nearly all of Four Island. Using the beautiful CSS-Bubbles located at http://www.willmayo.com/2007/02/10/css-speech-bubbles/ (hey look, I've sent a Pingback!), I've redesigned most of Four Island to include them. Just look at the RightBar, the blog, the blog comments, the Poll Archive. They look prettyful, and you know it.

The Quotes DB has been completely re-written so that it isn't Rash anymore, now it's completely my own code. Also, I've added a convenience method. If you are logged in while contributing a quote, you don't have to get it moderated.

Something you may have noticed. Look at the date if you haven't. Anyways, if you are superstitious, you may be thinking "What's Hatkirby doing, releasing the new Four Island on Friday the 13th?" Well, to answer that, for some reason Friday the 13ths have normally actually been more lucky for me than unlucky. Strange, but true.

Goodness, this has been a loooooong post. Well, anyways, I hope you enjoy the new Four Island! I'm so excited for it, and besides, it was a whole ton of work completely re-writing Four Island!

EDIT: Wow, it turns out that all of the problems with the Fourm have been resolved before I'd even had the chance to examine them. I think that they probably had something to do with the test subdomain I was using to test the new Four Island.