Yorkshire Twist - The Journal

As many of you will have seen, myJournal is built on the wonderful Wordpress platform. I would have called it a blogging system, but obviously we’ve taken it much, MUCH further than that, so it deserves s bigger title. And it’s all thanks to Wordpress’ great plugin system, which means we can take advantage of all the goodies that come with the system, and put a load of our own stuff – such as showrooms, profiles, the media library and more – on top.

Up until recently I’ve had to do a bit of hacking – changing the Wordpress source code – to make some of the more difficult things work. That’s meant it was a bit of a pain each time a new version of Wordpress came out, because upgrading meant redoing all my hacks. Well, no more! After bouncing some ideas of a member of the Wordpress team (specifically Andy Peatling who is developing BuddyPress) many hacks have gone, replaced with just one hack in one place – much easier to manage.

Does it work? Well, the site is now running on the very latest version of Wordpress with the new hack-light system in place, and it seems to be holding up well.

So what else has been happening? Firstly I’ve made the title and text boxes for the “Write a new entry” quick writing form on your journal page much bigger. I started to write this article and realised it was rubbish. I’ve also just put live a new “Latest products” list on the homepage which shows products which have just been added by any company. That’s a great way to get a bit more exposure for your products, so it’s now even more important to write a clear title and description so people know what they are looking at.

I’ve also done quite a bit of work in the Control Panel, adding a new “Get started” box and a wizard that takes you through the first steps in setting up your myJournal profile. That’s great for people who aren’t sure what to do once they have a myJournal account.

Speaking of the Control Panel, you may have noticed the new “Blocked members” page in the Contacts section. That’s where people who have annoyed you will go when you block them. You can block someone when they send you a myJournal email, a Wire message, or a contact request. Once someone is blocked they won’t be able to contact you again. We’ll keep an eye on who is blocking who, so if someone is obviously annoying a lot of people we can deal with them appropriately.

I’ve also done a load of little changes, including adding a list of countries for you to choose for your personal profile. There’s also quite a bit of search engine optimisation work happened, particularly with regard to showrooms, which should help you get even more exposure online.

OK, loads of changes there, but hopefully you’re as excited as me about the next phase of myJournal.