Sauce Digest: July Duct Tape Edition

The new patching system.I’m certainly taking my good old time with it, but work on the new site is proceeding slowly. To be able to say it’s proceeding at all is a good thing in this case. Anyway, here’s a summary of the changes and other important things going on:

The first and most major change I’ve put in recently is creating forum topics for each story – this goes in with the new comment system that’s going to be in place in the next week/month/year/whenever I get around to it. Basically, rather than having to deal with the clunky phpNuke comment system, the comment form will just put a reply to the forum thread, and the comments shown in the article will just be read from the forums database. The old comments are going to remain in their current form, as it’s way too much of a hassle to convert all the HTML to bbCode, plus removing it altogether is bound to break some part of the site I didn’t know existed.
Advanced users of the site may notice that the Multiheadlines module isn’t working properly – this is due to something that changed in the host’s configuration that we have no control over, apparently a lot of hosts are making this change now because the functions involved are commonly used as part of domain kiting schemes. To skirt the technobabble, basically it means the module can’t open external files, and therefore can’t read feeds. Once a solution to this problem is found, rather than simply patching the old module a new one will be put in place, as the current one is rife with bugs and issues, especially on the administrative side.

Pretty soon we’ll have a few new layouts to be tested, and we’re looking for a few people to give feedback and suggestions on these ideas. If you want to participate in this, send me a PM and I’ll give out instructions when the time comes. We’re getting really close to bringing a lot of new features online, but just keep getting hung up on small things.

I certainly hope to be able to set up the hopper sometime in the next week, which will allow you to simply drop in links to things you want to see stories about, while we do all the hard work. We’d especially like to see more music and video links, since they’ll be playing a major role in the new areas of the site.

So that’s about it, until next month, keep your stick on the ice.