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:
<ul>
<li>Logging in no longer forces a user to the WordPress back-end. It keeps them on whatever page they logged in from.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>The private message function is "in there" and it works</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>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.</li>
<li>Most form-based functions work better, though the membership sign-up thingie can still be a little cranky. I'm workin' on that.</li>
<li>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.</li>
</ul>

Thanks, Kevin.

That's the wonderful thing about a well supported, standardized CMS like WordPress -- changes like this can be implemented relatively quickly, with little or no downtime. If this had been a site built from scratch, or with a tool like Dreamweaver, I'd be at this for weeks.

I've still got some tweaking to do here and there. Version 3.2 will include a few more improvements to the forums, most notably the post editor will get an upgrade from BB code to an actual WYSIWYG editor. That's going to require some heavy-duty code rewrite, so it may be a while before I get to it.