As you can probably guess by the three-in-a-row blog posts, the tedium of doing the end-of-year accounts as well as the painstaking process of beta testing new versions of Theme Builder and Community Bubbles has taken me to the point where I could just scream. That would wake the wife up (it's nearly 5am) and she'd scream at me and probably throw something at me too. For the sake of everyone involved, I'm blogging!
We've had plans to revamp our website design for a while and as you can now see, the transition is pretty much complete. The page graphics have been floating around for almost a year but we've only just got round to implementing it. This time we decided to do a tutorial of the four stages.
Which brings me nicely on to...
New Community Spaces
We've been wanting to set these up for ages and get them in to a fit state for public consumption, and we've finally made some progress.
We set up our Theme Builder forum space a while ago, but it was a bit sparse. If you've not checked it since, go take a look now: Theme Builder community
Likewise, we've also added a Community Bubbles community which is worth a look because for the first time we're doing some of our development work publicly so customers can participate in the process and make sure we don't mess up what is a small but surprisingly difficult development task (it looks simple on the surface, especially now most of the concept pondering is complete, but it's been a real nightmare to do).
In addition, we've revamped the Scriptix community, adding a forum and some improved navigation.
We're hoping to achieve the following with the the new community spaces:
- Allow users of the plugins to more readily communicate and share ideas
- Provide a single source for the latest news and information
- Make it easier to find resources related to a specific plugin
- Hopefully offload some of our huge customer support workload in to the public forums (seriously, this would really help us roll out product updates far more quickly if you start chatting in the forums!)
By watching the community spaces, you effectively join a mailing list and hook in to all the latest tutorials, forum discussions and news for the associated plugin.
I'm giving serious consideration to moving the user guides for the Builder and Bubbles plugins in to their respective spaces to really bring everything together, but I'm not sure if it would lead to too much noise in terms of change notification emails for people watching the space. What do you think?
As part of the recent community space binge, I've also turned my blog in to a forum/community too!
Right, I'm probably going to be in "Monk Mode" for the rest of January, locked away in a dark room chanting and performing strange rituals... Unless said activities once more drive me to a blogging frenzy!
