Since our beta launch last week, our development staff has been trying to keep up with bugfixes and feature requests as quickly as possible. We've squashed a lot of bugs and added a number of new things, but there are still quite a few projects in process. Let me catch you up on what we're working on - hopefully your feature request is already on this list!
A columnists page. We have our full staff list, but many readers have also asked about an easier way to find our columnists, and we can do that. I'm working on it right now, in fact.A page that lists just the stories from the print edition, organized by section. We've also heard from a number of readers who liked browsing the online stories in the order they appeared in the print newspaper. We can do that too.You can give the print-edition-only list a try right here. There are links on all the daily news pages (i.e. Today), as well as in the navigation.- Timestamp and print page number listed on each story page.
- The infamous SportsLink filters. On the old SportsLink blog, you could include/exclude certain types of posts based on your interests. This was a more popular feature than I thought! We'll be working it into the new SportsLink too.
The "Latest Comments" list in our blog sidebars should list commenters by first/last name instead of just username.The "Latest Comments" pages for each blog should list the title of the post each comment is from. That helps provide context when you're looking at a lot of comments at once.Also on our blogs, we're nearly ready to enable customized sidebars, with blogrolls, link lists, and so on.Increase character limit on comments to 4000, from 3000.Provide an RSS feed of all comments on a blog, instead of just per-post comment feeds.Provide an RSS feed of all stories, instead of just feeds by section.- Allow at least some HTML in comments, for bolding, italicizing, and so on. This is a security issue, but we'll be looking into something that can work.
- Bypass the premium filter when our own bloggers link to Spokesman.com stories. This was something we provided on the old website, and should be something we can put into this one too.
- Move our Gonzaga Basketball and Cougar Basketball section pages from the old site into the new framework.
Profile pages are caching comment feeds, which means you sometimes see another user's recent comments list on your profile page.CSS styling for blockquotes. How did I miss that?!Link to our photo reprints site from our photo cover.- Revise the Letters to the Editor cover page. Readers are asking for just a simple list of letters from today, with calendar navigation to any day.
- Easier entry into our story archives, with calendar navigation.
This isn't a comprehensive list, by any means. But I think it covers most of the things we know we still need to fix, and a number of suggestions that have come in from readers in the past several days that we haven't gotten to yet.
Update: I'll cross out the items we finish like this, and update you on progress on other projects.
