Many many changes in store for 2009-10

There have been many changes made to the site since June. We will be releasing a new version of the user guide going forward, but a short overview is:

• Editions
• Backdated has now been eliminated. Editions are now either active or inactive. The date MUST BE BEFORE TODAY OR TODAY in order for an active edition to appear.
• An edition can now have more than one PDF associated with it. For the love of all that is good, please keep these under 5 Mb -- preferably 1 Mb. No one has that much time.
  
• Articles
• You cannot leave the title field blank now. Doing so used to make articles unclickable on the admin screen.
• Appearance
• Lots of changes here. We have separated the appearance and newspaper information screens.
• We have introduced what is known as an AJAX application for the appearance page. This allows you to see the changes in real time. It's really cool.
  
• We now have five page designs -- up from two before. They are named after the Great Lakes -- HOMES -- Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. They all look slightly different.
• We have introduced colors to various parts of the screen.
• We have introduced different motifs for you to use.
• We will be adding additional features going forward in this area.
• Public pages
• The weather now appears on the front page of your site. This is based on your ZIP code. You can see what we have for you on the School Information page; let us know if it's wrong. Also, you can turn off the weather (and various other features) on that page.
  
• Pages now look really different. In addition to the changes outlined above, you have:
• changes to the list view (list or card view)
• changes to the icon sizes (they should now be no deeper than 22 pixels deep)
  
• Full Story icons appear different (and change color when you hover over them)
• headlines themselves are ALL CAPS now.
  
• We now allow feeds to be read on the site. If you have RSS feeds (say from this blog or another one outside our site -- remember, we have regulated blogs, too, and they work just like stories -- you can have them available on your site by clicking on Add [RSS feeds that will be prominent on your site] from the dashboard.