BraveNewCode Support Forums 2.0

We’ve launched our brand-new Support Forums today, the long-awaited redux for our previous forums which we took offline late last year.

Significant effort went into the new forums, as we re-built them from scratch on bbPress 1.0.2. We’ve added lots of little details to hopefully make our forum experience easy and intuitive for our users, such as: Simple, clear uncluttered views of topics and forums, helpful hints and reminders for publishing topics and replies, Ajax publishing for topics and replies, Ajax favourites and tagging, and much more.

We’ve also added a Bug Reporter Tool available in the forums (available for registered members), for easy filing of those types of issues which we can’t offer a fix for in the forums but can log and track and hopefully resolve in upcoming releases.

BNCID

What’s a BNCID? Simply put it’s an account you create that will hopefully make doing things BNC-related super simple. It’s one account that we’ve planned out to:

• Make comments on the blog under your BNCID username
• Start topics and reply to topics in the forums
• Manage product licenses for any products we may release in the future
• Gain access to special promotions, offers, discounts, etc
• Manage your e-mail subscriptions to blog posts
• … and more!

We’re still building things out for the BNCID accounts, including the account page itself where all the managing of account details and features will take place. Eventually a BNCID holder will have this single page that will let them manage all account features and see blog/forum activity.

It’s something that we really haven’t seen done with WordPress yet that we really think is a must when you build a large, diverse website with several account features such as what we have planned for BNC.

So head on over to the forums and take a look around!
We hope you enjoy them!

~The BNC Team

Website Features

When we started re-architecting this site, one of the crucial aspects during development was that it had to be easy for us to manage. Being only a two person company, we could easily spend a good portion of every week managing and maintaining our website and internet presence. While we wanted a fully functional website, we also didn’t want to be a slave to the maintenance of it.

So to that end here is a brief description of some of the cooler features that are under the hood here.

Flickr Driven Portfolios

If you head over to our porfolio or our product pages, you’ll see we’ve added a lot more information. One area that we’ve beefed up is the product and portfolio image galleries. In the past, we manually added the images using the WordPress system, and while that worked, it wasn’t very fast or efficient. On this new site, we’ve tied all the image galleries into Flickr, so they are completely managed and updated using Flickr and associated tools such as Flickr uploader. All the titles and descriptions for each image come from Flickr as well, and given Flickr’s AJAX content editing interface, it is a real snap to edit content on each of the images.

Remote Plugin Information

Most of our plugins are updated every week or so, and keeping our website up to date with regards to the changes in each version used to be time consuming. On our last website, we finally started pulling some information in from the content on WordPress.org, and have enhanced that even further with this version. On all our plugin pages the download links, change log, last time the product was updated, and associated file sizes are all updated remotely from information over at WordPress.org. From our side, as soon as we check in a new plugin version on the WordPress plugin repository, the associated information will automatically update itself on BraveNewCode.com.

Enhanced Fonts

It’s a real shame that the Internet has essentially been limited to only a handful of web-safe fonts. While there are various technologies that allow the use of additional fonts, we finally came across one that we wanted to try on BraveNewCode: Cufón. As you can see, most of the headings are now in a dynamically generated font called Steinem. We felt that this font added to the look and feel of our website, and fit in well with the spirit behind the content.

jQuery Love

You’ll find sprinkles of jQuery effects and ajax around the site (for example the nice tooltips that pop up on download buttons), all of which was added to make navigation easier and to add some UI gloss to the website.

Jenga: More Than Just A Game

We had a little fun updating the content in a few areas, as evidenced by our spiffy new page talking about our website design and development practices. While we take pride in the work we do, we also like having fun while doing it.

Support Forums

We know that many of our plugin users have been aching for support while the support forums have been down. We apologize again, but it’s the only way we can truly complete our client work, continue to develop our plugins, and finish the overhaul to the forums themselves.

Still More To Do

Not everything is completed with the site revamp, and we’ll be adding more in the coming weeks ahead. Enhancements to the blog, portfolio and product areas, as well as the addition of user accounts here at BraveNewCode.

The New Frontier

We still have a lot to roll out in the next few months here at BraveNewCode, but our new website was a pretty big bullet point on our to-do list, and we’re happy to finally cross it off and share the end result with everyone. By all means, drop us a comment and let us know what you think. Look forward to some more great stuff from The BraveNewCode team in the near future. Happy surfing!