What's New At GabrielGadfly.com

Welcome to the latest incarnation of GabrielGadfly.com. As you can see, there are some big changes a'foot (and at hand!). The old design, launched in April 2009, was feeling a bit dated and Drupal 5, the content management system I was using, wasn't really providing the tools I needed, so I've given everything a major overhaul.

We're now running Drupal 6 with a host of new and useful modules that bring a lot of new features to the site, including a better system to run the e-commerce functions of the site. Because of these new tools, there'll be lots of new types of content coming to the site, including video blogs, poetry reviews, a weekly round-up of online poetry, and more. Here's a (mostly complete) summary of the changes:

The Good

• The Poetry index page has been reorganized into categorical sections; my original poetry is now separate from guest poetry and poetry translations.
• Reading pages (i.e., what you actually see when you read a poem or story) are a lot cleaner now.
• There's a new Random Poetry page that will display a random piece of my original poetry every time you refresh the page.
• Purchasing MP3s and/or PDFs and other products through the e-commerce system no longer requires a membership; however, if you aren't a logged in member, you'll be buying a one-time download. If you're logged in, you'll be purchasing a lifetime download.
• Major blog overhaul. The original site's blog was kinda haphazardly tacked on. This version of the site includes a lot more tools that will let me blog more efficiently. Expect lots of new content (most of it related to the weblit/poetry worlds). There will also be photo galleries, video blogs, etc.
• 404 & 403 error pages have been redesigned and are hopefully a little more user-friendly (and fun) now.
• Implemented a new bookmarking system; logged-in members can now save a list of their favorite content.
• Brand spanking new logo.
• Courier's Creed is gone. The last update was well over a year ago, and it's not likely it'll ever be worked on again. I didn't like contributing yet-another-unfinished-novel to the weblit world. For those interested, a PDF of the 16 chapters that were finished will be released soon.
• Certain other bits of outdated / substandard content have been culled as well. If you see any 404 pages, let me know, but I think most things should have proper redirects set up.
• Implemented a number of modules like Rules, Flags, etc. that will let me do all sorts of nifty magic
• Better placement (I hope) of social media links.

The Bad

• All user accounts have been deleted. If you registered at one point, you'll need to re-register. I hated to do that, but it was kinda unavoidable (without getting into the technical jargon, it's related to a borked Drupal 5 installation that prevented the normal upgrade procedure, so I had to do a clean Drupal 6 install).
• Likewise, all comments have been cleared. Same reason as above.
• Forums are currently disabled. I don't have time to get them looking the way I want, and they were never used much anyway. They might get revived in the nebulous future.

The Not-Yet-Implemented

• The prose section (formerly Short Stories) is temporarily down. I ran out time to port stuff over. I'll get to it soon.
• Photo Galleries -- Photography is another of my hobbies, and I'll be able to finally start showing it off here on the site.
• Miscellaneous membership perks -- not saying much about these yet, but there's nifty things in the works.

I'm sure there's errors. I probably forgot to set a permission or set up a redirect or whatever. If you run into any problems, you can contact me through the site's Contact Page or, if that doesn't work, you can email me directly at gabrielgadfly at gmail dot com, or find me on Twitter.

So what do you think?