New Year, New Fresh Loaf

Hi! This is a post regarding the site refresh (that I'm cross-posting to the old site as well so I don't have to keep recreating it every time we do a migration)

As you are likely aware, Floyd's been working on a site upgrade for the past several weeks (months!).

It's not done done yet, and there are a number of tweaks and improvements that we know we want to get to, and definitely there's some polishing up we want to do, but we're looking to get the site migrated and this is a change to test things out, and for right now, we want to make sure the most important and basic functionality is in place so that we can do a full site migration hopefully around the end of the year.

What's new:

Works on your mobile devices (finally!):

• The new site is designed to be more mobile-friendly. When we started this site 20 years ago, phone browsing wasn't really a thing...and the site migration gave us the opportunity to update the layout of the site so you should now be able to look up your forum and recipe posts more easily from the kitchen on your phones and tablets and hopefully now the site will be significantly more readable on smaller devices.
• Images added to forum and blog posts will now display responsively (meaning that they should look ok on phones and tablets now.) 
  (known issue: when uploading large images, be sure to wait for the full upload before saving your post (it's easy to miss - you'll see a small indicator at the top of the image and then a little dialog box will pop up prompting you to enter an image description to help describe what's being shown for any visually impaired site visitors)
• The new inserted video link option allows you to share things like youtube videos that won't break on phones. (known issue: select the "responsive video" option when adding new videos for now - we’ll see about changing it to make that the default when we can get to fixing this part)

Your account profile:

• There is intention to improve the site-wide user menu that gets you access to your account features - but that's gonna take us a little chunk of time to get it working and we are antsy to share this with you even before we've got that level of polish on the site ... so hang tight on that feature.
• For right now,  you can get to your account menu on the side bar (or bottom of the page on mobile devices) when you're logged in. 
• You can also access your account from the goofy little bread icon in the right hand corner by the search bar (it's just a temporary placeholder for that better account menu feature we have in mind for now). 
• Your old profile descriptions have not been migrated and we've simplified that a lot. If you feel like adding some information about yourself to share with community members, you may edit your account and add that to the bio and it will appear to trusted community members when they view your profile page. 
• Your old bookmarks have also been migrated - you can find these from the "My Bookmarks" tab on your "My Account" page.

Email notifications:

• Right now in this testing phase (while it's on the "refresh" site url), no notifications are being sent out from this test site and all your emails have been scrambled as a safe measure, so you won't get or trigger any notifications with activity on this site and none of that stuff has been tested yet. 
• Note that if you try to reset your password from an existing account on this test server it won't work for this reason (we don't have your email on this test server to send you the link)
• For the same reason, creating a new account on the test server won’t work because you won’t be getting that email that’s needed to complete the process.
• We have also not migrated old follow links (stuff you followed for email notifications when people made comments there). We still have some work to do around the notifications stuff - baby steps. Bear with us here.
• Private messaging has changed a bit.  Your old messages will still be found in your "All Messages" page - but how the feature works has had to change a bit.  For right now, you can send messages to other established site members by sending to their site username from the New Message tab on your Messages page. (there's not a button on everyone's profile at the moment like the old site used to have).
• Fancy stuff like getting notifications about incoming messages on the site itself (beyond email which isn’t turned on right now) are.. well... on the list, but much lower from all the other stuff we want to improve here. (This site was never intended to replace private messaging apps like your email and we generally prefer not to have any of your private sensitive stuff sitting on our servers)  
• Note that newly created accounts and accounts that haven't had this feature enabled for them will continue to not have access to the private messaging in order to prevent spam and general misuse of the system.

Other:

• Some of the lesser used features of the old site have been simplified because there wasn't an easy way to migrate them. We had experimented with a "recipe" post content type but very few people were using it and it didn't really work (it was supposed to do all the math for halving and doubling recipes), and anyway most of this site is a giant recipe archive, so we've folded that content type into regular forum type content.
• Some sections like the old FAQs are going to need some content refreshes since a lot of stuff is a little bit different - at least around the how-to site navigation stuff. Bear with us on this as it'll come but likely not immediately. Right now our primary focus is getting existing site members comfortable in the new setting and hopefully happy with some of the improvements, and making sure that we've captured and moved the loads of great wisdom that have been posted here over the years continues to live on the site for new site visitors stumbling here from web searches.

There's a few cosmetic tweaks that we're aware of that are higher on our list post launch, but right now we're trying to get the actual content migrated first and make sure it's working enough that data wasn't lost and it's not impossible to use anymore. Bear with us -  there may be a few mops and ladders still sitting around the workplace while we open up the cafe to our community members in the new workspace.

Additional updates about the final migration work noted in Floyd's most recent blog post.