The OSgrid website overhaul is getting a little further; I’m now happy enough with the WordPress layout to push this live (although some tweaking with comment layouts is going to be required); there are a number of important changes that are being made – outside of the new layout that is.
The first is that logins are being harmonised – comments on this blog require an OSGrid.org login; and so do the forums now – you can login to the forums now using your full avatar name and normal grid password. We’re not yet setting the session variables yet so you only need to login once — right now you need to login to Elgg, WordPress and phpBB seperately (although if you check ‘save my info’, it will persist.); it’s a TODO item.
Secondly – we’re cleaning up a bit of the internals of a lot of our backend code. The initial Elgg integration was somewhat messy; so we’re going to be refining parts of this – particularly with an emphasis on making our changes more portable in the future (such as when we need to upgrade Elgg versions.); this will mean we can do a bit more code sharing between wordpress, elgg & phpBB – who now copy certain template elements rather than reference them with any commonality.
There is still a lot to do – the next item on the agenda is to move this theme into the forums; and also fix the template for lower-resolution monitors (such as Nebadon’s netbook.); the final stage will be deploying the template onto the main Elgg site – this will be a fairly painstaking process, expect parts of the site to look funny for several days while we find and fix all the bugs that inevitably turn up. Once we’ve got the template in place; we’ve got a number of goodies we’d like to work on – such as some statistics for every region on the grid; improving some of our charts and more.
