I thought I’d get the ball rolling by posting the first blog using the new front end. It’s taken a little longer than planned so we hope it’s worth the wait. Blogs are managed a little differently than the last site so I’ll just give a few brief pointers.

We’ve separated editing and management of posts as follows.

Editing blog posts

The editor is simply for working on a single blog posts. If you’ve blogged before following this link will load your latest post into the editor. If you don’t have any existing blogs you’ll be redirected to the create blog page, just add a title to start work on a new post.

The editor has two modes, a rich text WYSIWYG editor or a plain text version that supports Jetpack markdown. It’s also possible to work in a full screen mode for distraction free writing.

You can save your post and preview it from the editor but no more. Blogs are managed from your profile page.

Managing blog posts

To edit older blogs, publish drafts, turn published posts to drafts and use the trash features you’ll need to visit your profile page. This lists your most recent blog posts with, hopefully self explanatory buttons beside them.

One word of reassurance, trashed posts can be restored. They can also be deleted permanently. There’s no “are you sure” check for this but only posts already in the trash can be erased.

Other improvements

There’s a few other improvements:

Author Biographies

Bios are now supported for the author pages, you can add yours from the update profile page.

Code formatting in posts

Code formatting in blog posts is provided using https://highlightjs.org/, but you’ll need to follow these instructions.

Event display

An improved display for single event pages, with Google map and calendar support.

Avatar support

We’re not currently supporting uploaded images for authors. Instead we’ve opted to use Gravatar, a service that links images to email addresses. Register the email address associated with your account at Gravatar, associate an image with the address, and it’ll show up on the site.

That’s all really, I hope that you enjoy sharing your thoughts and expertise with the community. As ever suggestions and comments are welcome, just get in touch.