Okay, I’ve been workin’ on the MADmodules railroad site, all this live-long eve. All the menus are revamped and important information is pretty clearly available in the sidebar. The site’s been given the usability thumbs up from Donna, who feigned interest long enough to look around and try everything.

Some cool little things:

• Logging in no longer forces a user to the WordPress back-end. It keeps them on whatever page they logged in from.
• There are a couple of member-only functions. If someone tries to use them without first logging in, they’ll get a login screen. After they log in, they will continue directly to their destination, instead of having to start over.
• The private message function is “in there” and it works
• Completely new and slightly simplified forum. Somehow, it automagically brought over all the old forum content (for what that’s worth), even though there’s absolutely no reason it should have, except that the author thought it should.
• New calendar system (access through the WordPress Dashboard, look for “Events”) is much better suited to our site than previous one was. As well as regular calendar events, it allows people to “book space” in an event. This is really useful for seminar-type events.
• Most form-based functions work better, though the membership sign-up thingie can still be a little cranky. I’m workin’ on that.
• Still working on some way to pull the Yahoo!Group in, but not that hard. I’m really not sure I want to go there, beyond the reciprocal links already in place.

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After a little discussion today, we came to the conclusion that the MADmodules web site could do with a little clean-up and simplification, both on the front-end and the back-end. To that end, I’ve spent a few hours re-organizing and cleaning up the layout and upgrading much of the software that makes MADmodules.com tick. Hopefully, this has helped to make the site a bit more usable. As always, we welcome the feedback of both MADmodules members and visitors.

Changes include an updated overall look and layout of, as well as replacement of the GigPress event calendar system with a new event manager that is a bit easier to use. GigPress was designed for use by bands or other performance groups to announce their tour schedules. Bending it to work for MADmodules turned out to be a bit confusing for both visitors and administrators.

Next on tap will be a revamp of the forums. Stay tuned to see how that turns out…

Well, now. Lookie here!

Regular visitors will notice that the MADmodules.com site has been completely revamped with a new, spiffy magazine-style layout. There’s still some work to be done — notably the color scheme for the forums, and the formatting for the links page — but by-and-large, it’s done. Hopefully, I’ll get the finishing touches done by the end of the weekend.

One thing to check out will be some level of instructions in the forums on how MADmodules members can contribute to the site. Yeah! Now that’s exciting!

Well, that went a lot more quickly, and a lot more smoothly than I’d anticipated. The new forums system has been installed, configured and activated. As I suspected, old posts were not able to be moved to the new forum. Fortunately, there were only three or four to this point. Hopefully, the posters will feel like re-entering their posts.

The new forums, while not quite as easy to use, offer a wealth of features, most importantly, the ability to upload pictures and other media and documents to the site (including PDF and DOC files). The default post editor is also much easier to use — the icons generally do what you’d expect them to!

Folks, before we get too far in to this, I thought it might be a Good Thing to go ahead an put in a more robust forums system. Of course, there’s an up-side and a down-side.

The up-side is that the new forums will be much more full-featured, including (relatively) easy inclusion of images.

The down-sides are that anything posted to date will be lost (which is only a couple of things anyway) and the new system is necessarily a little more complicated to use (but no more so than the popular Railroad Line forums).

The MADModules forums will be down for a good bit of the day as I add and configure the new forum software.