It"s that time of the year again, the 1st of October, where we can celebrate a successful 9 years online! I"m happy to announce that this past year has seen a vast improvement to our news reporting. In October last year we moved from mainly syndicated news, to original news and paid staff to realise this. As a result our footprint on the Internet has improved and we"re now being quoted on many of our competitors in the field.
We are also working on a huge update to the site which will see the back-end (content management system) completely replaced by a new cleaner, leaner code written by our very own developers, the site theme will also be updated to "Atlas", you can view a preview of that here. We"ll also be updating the forum software to the latest version of Invision Power Board, currently at version 3.0.3. This is expected to take place sometime this month, although the date has not yet been finalized. The current CMS was started in 2002 with James Tingle, which was the basis for his VirtuaNews (no longer exists) and saw many changes/updates along the way. Eventually we always had to move onto bigger & better things which is why we will be retiring that code this year.
Older themes
All of the older themes available on Neowin (Swift/Shift/Finity) will also be retired along with the update because our developers have decided to start from scratch with the IPB3 (forum software) code, which means we will be moving away from the continued code hacks that have enabled our boards to always look vastly different than the base install of IPB3. All of our hacks, like display names retaining their group colors throughout the boards will be moved over, no features will be dropped, but it will take too much time and effort to update the older themes to work on IPB3. Please do give us your feedback on the theme here, at the moment it seems this update has been well received.
Fixed vs Fluid Design
A lot of discussion has arisen over the site being made fixed over fluid. I just want to mention that this applies only to the news page, but not the forums, the forums will be completely fluid. We decided that the forums don"t need to look exactly like the news page. The reason for having the design fixed on the news pages is so that we can account for the content much better. Everything simply fits in the main page and articles, including image and video content. The design accounted for this and was intentional.
Anyway, I"d like to says thanks for your continued support of Neowin, it makes me really happy to see members from 2001/2 still actively posting on the forums. You make the site what it is today and we all really appreciate that!