Changelog

We added a teaser field for the text before the title of each section (such as foreshadowing for each chapter). Somehow, even with all the reading and testing, we totally missed that important feature!

We have made the visitor page (the front page you are not logged in) has been completely redesigned. The sign-up process has also been streamlined. In addition, when you do sign up, the next steps are made much clearer.

We removed Spam Master. There were far too many false positives. We went with another solution that is totally self-contained to the site. It seems far more accurate too, instead of relying on patterns and lists from a third-party.

When we create demos, we have been making up some lame story about people camping and encountering aliens and a mad scientist. We decided to use a well-known public-domain novel. There are many, and we asked one of our first test users to pick one.

All our demos will be based on the wonderful Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, first published in 1911. The play is not public domain, but the novel is!

There are many, many fixes and little enhancements that have been added over the last week. Some security improvements, too. The main thing you will notice is Characters and Locations have aliases. You can now click on a button to search for all mentions of the name of the Character or Location, and it will automatically add the aliases as well.

The search functionality is greatly enhanced. It is much faster and more precise. It also shows an excerpt of each matching item with the phrase used to search with is bold. In theory, when you save something, it is added to the index and immediately searchable.

Major new feature! Reading mode. You can view your Project in an environment similar to a Kindle or other reading app. If you see something you want to change right then, you can click (or tap) on the text, which will directly take you to the Section or Subsection.

It’s time for fun with things we don’t want you to see! We have added a much more excellent 404 page with an animation. We also added a spinner that shows if a page does not load instantly (most all are instant).

Word counts are here! Getting that working was way more complicated than it should have been! The flexible structure of the site actually made it quite a bear to work through. However, it is done! Enjoy the encouragement you will get from seeing that number rise each time you visit.

BOOM! Scored 100 across the board in Google PageSpeed Insights!

A vast number of tweaks and enhancements have been added. All kinds of little things are there now to make the site intuitive and clean in design.

Amongst the enhancements are:

• Added back is Scroll to Top. We removed it because a toolbar was in the same place. Now the toolbar is in a much better location on the page. Glad to see that back because pages can get long!
• The most recent items that have been changed in each of the item categories now show for each Project on the front page and for the specific Project on the Project’s page.
• Help on the search page. Also streamlined the search field in the footer.
• The user menu is a very cute icon now.
• The heading spacing was off when the heading changed to show a link to the default project. Now, it is very consistent.
• A lot of back-end cleanup. Naming and all that is very consistent. That will make it much easier to maintain moving forward.

The toolbar at the top of each item is now dynamic. It does not give you an option that does not make sense. For example, go into edit mode if you are already editing. That might cause someone to lose work. It also includes a save button! That was a requested change we are glad we could do. So now you can use the hotkey to save (⌘S on Mac and ⌃S on Windows), the save button at the bottom, or the save button in the toolbar at the top. Pretty sweet!

It’s accessibility time! Check this out: We got a score of 97 from Google. It is the same for both mobile and desktop. The only things it reported are some minor contrast issues and sequential headings. If https://www. apple.com does not care about sequential ordering, then neither do we. https://www. ibm.com got a score of 95, so I am pretty darn happy.

We have made many little changes and tweaks to keep things consistent across pages. Made the notes field mandatory on the new user registration form to help fight automated spam.

We dramatically decreased all the unnecessary markup in the manuscript display in preparation for screenplay formats and Word/PDF exports of completed manuscripts. The CMS adds a ridiculous number of divs.

We enhanced the unused file cleaning option. Basically, if you remove an image from an item, and save it, a version where that specific image still existed remains so the image remains if you ever want to revert. You can see these by viewing an item’s revisions. Sometimes the system makes mistakes and orphaned images remain. This should be helped a lot now.

We added an accessibility toolbar. You can easily change the font size for the entire site. Kudos to the developers of the Civic Accessibility Toolbar module.

We made enhancements to the user session system. You can now elect “Remember me,” and a cookie will be set in your browser so you don’t have to log in using that particular browser. You can also view your current session and end all other sessions (not the one you are currently using). This update also has various bug fixes and little enhancements, as always.

We also added our own alert system so messages of various kinds can be placed on the front page to alert users of important information after logging in.

Boom! There are massive UX changes— including a new super-cool toolbar. The Sticky Local Tasks module kept breaking and was a pain in the butt to keep running. We also didn’t like how it changed the whole site. I like this new option even better; it is incredibly stable and flexible. We made it ourselves, so we know exactly how it works.

The switch to Bootstrap UI widgets is as complete as it is likely to be.

We added a Help menu option with an expanded FAQ. We got rid of those help boxes when creating a Note and Project. They are now FAQ entries, which makes much more sense.

We are really happy with the UX now! ❤️❤️❤️

Some significant UX enhancements. Editing, viewing, and deleting items is now done via contextual menus instead of those clunky tabs. We got rid of the delete button at the bottom. Everything is in the contextual menu in the lower right of the page. Thanks to the developers of Sticky Local Tasks for this brilliant add-on.

We tweaked some spacing so it looks nice and evenly spaced on any device, from a huge desktop monitor to a tiny smartphone.

We bit the bullet and started social media accounts to reach more people and give us a place to post new demos.

We got rid of the cookie compliance module. There is only one cookie on this site now, and it is required for the site to function, so there is no opt-in or opt-out. We also dumped the annoying popup module because I can do the same with models and Views.

There is a bug in Safari (based on WebKit) in macOS and iOS. It stops images from loading properly if they are set to lazy load, and there is a specific type of cookie. It sucks because this site uses lazy load images everywhere and a secure cookie system. Apple needs to fix this, as it has been going on for a long time.

While one of us was writing, we noticed we were going to the All Items page a lot, then would pick what types of items we wanted and click Apply. Why make everyone click Apply? We added auto-submit on the All Items page, so you choose what you want, and it updates the list. We had to write our own JavaScript, as the Drupal option is deep into JQuery, which we are trying to avoid. Better Exposed Filters needs to cut the cord with JQuery.

We added a complete RSS feed for Changelog and FAQ items. It works well for the three people on the planet that still use RSS.

We added a very cool set of features using ImageMagick. First, it optimizes the images so they perform faster. Also, and this is the coolest, it subtly enhances the images. We took before and after screenshots. It is really amazing. No one may really notice, but we know it’s making things sharper.

Click on the image below to see.

We had to get rid of the Mix module. We are sad. It was destroying the admin user account configuration page.

You really won’t see this, but we added another strong layer of security, so even when we log on as admin, we don’t see anyone’s work. It was bugging us that we were seeing a list of everyone’s stuff. We log in as a regular account to write, which only shows our stuff. But we have to log in as an admin to work on the site itself.

This additional layer of security keeps us from seeing anyone else’s stuff unless we jump through hoops, which we would do if someone needed technical assistance, or we suspect someone is posting illegal stuff. You can see what we see when we login in the image below.

New members now have a much more streamlined process. Also, the user’s page displays membership status (and Founder status).

We did some capacity testing on the site by adding 5000 items to an account with random properties and every single one with tons of text and an image. The site handled it fine, but it exposed some UX issues with how many records show before a pager is used for pagination and how the pagers looked pretty bad on mobile.