It's a new site, and while lots of stuff is the same, we did end up changing the design of the site a little to create a more solid codebase. We're hoping the incremental changes over the next year or so will come quickly within this new design.
But lots of you are probably like me the first week I used this: wondering where things are or how they function. So here's the missing manual where I try to translate some things from the old site to the new.
There are really two sections in here:
- Where Did It Go? - a translation of commonly used items
- Tips and Tricks - how to accomplish a few things that you might want to do
As always, if we've missed things, you have problems, etc., feel free to drop a note in the forums. We've got a special forum set up for issues with the new site.
Where Did It Go?
Some things have moved, so I'm going to try and list the changes I know about. If I've missed anything, let me know or drop a note in the discussion.
| Old Site | New Site |
| Columnists Page | It's now at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Authors/Articles/Steve_Jones/3/for me. Similar places for others, but really you'll just want to search for the author's name. |
| FAQs | They're toast. They weren't used that much and they're a pain to maintain. We're looking at some other alternatives, like a Wiki for this stuff. If you really want us to do FAQs, vote for it. |
| One Year Ago, Two Years Ago | We removed these to try and clean up the home page. If there's interest, we can bring them back, but we republish the popular articles, so this isn't a big deal right now. |
| Products and Books | For now they're gone. We need to port this content, but it's something of a mess, so if you want it sooner, Vote for it. |
| Links | Same as products and books. We'll port this over to a specific place soon. Vote for it. |
| The Article List (by category) | We've gone to a tagging system instead. The categories roughly got ported, but start here and then pick tags. If you have complaints, there is a tag thread in the forums where you can let us know what we're doing wrong. |
| Contribution Center | It's here. We're tracking back scripts and articles to people. You can submit them and they'll get into the workflow. |
| Newsletter Archive | It's here. Should be easier to use and find older newsletters. |
| Virtual Briefcase | It's here and has a new look. We don't have the popular entries on there, but Voteand let us know it's worth building again. |
| Active Topics | On the forums page, at the top there's a "Recent Posts" item. Click that and see a menu for "Posts Since My Last Visit". |
| Search | We've given up here. It's hard to do well, it needs constant maintenance and tuning and Google does it better. So we're using their Custom Search to power ours on the site. We will search out articles across the Internet, so if you are looking for SQL Server content, chances are you'll find it here, but if you need something, the search should pick it up. |
There's probably some things we've forgotten, but drop a note in the New Site Problems forum and we'll take a look. That will be monitored pretty heavily for the next few weeks.
Tips and Tricks
We hope you really like the new site. It should run a little smoother, less bumps, be easier to navigate, etc. In this section we'll go over a few common things and how you can make them smoother in the new system.
Posting
This is one of the areas of this site that gets a lot of hits. So we've upgraded our forum software to the newest version. Most things work similar, we're still single threaded, the same forum structure, etc., but we've added some new stuff as well.
The biggest change is the replies. When you click reply, you'll open the posting form at the top with all the editing controls and smileys, etc. And it works in Firefox!!!
Just below that, if you look at the image below, there are a few sections that can open and close. One of these is the "Last 10 Posts in Descending Order" section. If you click the plus box on the right, it will expand and you can see what you're replying to. And it will stay open the next time you reply to a post.
RSS
You've asked, or at least a few of you, and so we've RSS'd everything. Or at least most everything we can think of. There are RSS buttons for every forum and every thread. Just look for the RSS Button and add it to your reader.
You can subscribe to a forum and get pinged for all new posts. We have RSS feeds for the headlines, the articles, basically any tag you want. We've even got one for the Editorials!
If you don't want to download a reader, you can sign up for the Google Reader and keep it all online. It's what we use here.
If we've missed any, let us know.
Tags
And speaking of tags... We've abandoned the category thing in favor of what seems to be rather popular in many other sites and blogs: tags. Basically it's a constantly flowing set of categories and we will try to assign the proper tags to each piece of content. If you go to a page, like the Articles page, you will see a list of tags at the top. Pick a tag and you'll see content applied to that tag (along with a count of articles). If we're missing some, let us know.
It's free flowing, so whether you go through SQL Server 2005 -> Triggers or T-SQL -> Triggers -> SQL Server 2005, you'll find your content.
Contributions
Many of you submit scripts to us and you can now add them in the contribution center. What's more, feel free to send us articles or question for the QOD as well. Just remember if we pick them your name will be on there, so be warned.
Wrapping It Up
There's a lot to talk about with the new site and we'll try to discuss some of the architecture decisions here over the next week or so. I'm sure some of you are annoyed and some thrilled, but we had to make some decisions and we'll try to explain them to you.
If you've got other suggestions or comments, drop them in the discussion and let us know.