1. New photo and video albums.
UKB uses 3rd-party add-ons to the forums for photos and videos, which has really held back the ongoing development of the website, since I'm dependent on the authors of those add-ons to keep them up to date. Unfortunately, neither have been updated for over a year, bugs have not been fixed, and I can't even upgrade the forum itself, which increases the potential for security vulnerabilities to be exploited.
I've therefore decided to remove the photo albums (app.php/gallery) and video albums (app.php/video) from the forums
... and have created an equivalent mechanism that is part of the main website. No photos or videos will be lost in the process (in fact, they've already been copied over!). The reason I don't think this will be an issue is that we have a solid library of photos that are used on the species pages (ID charts, etc.), and updates to the images we use on the species pages is relatively-infrequent. The new mechanism will allow Vince (and other mods) to add new images to the relevant albums (in the new mechanism) without having to ask any member to upload their images to the photo album themselves 
I'll be meeting up with Vince to fine-tune things at some point, since he 'owns' this element of the website (and I've just spoken with him).2. No more personal albums.
The downside (to members) is that we will no longer be able to support personal albums (app.php/gallery/users), and I'll be contacting those members that use this facility ahead of time so that they can move their images to some other hosting platform (e.g. Flickr, Photobucket etc.). Personal Diaries will remain as-is.
3. A responsive website.
Another significant enhancement is that the website will be 'responsive', in that it will scale down to support tablets, smartphones etc. This is still a work in progress, but is just about there.
- UKB on iMac
- UKB on iMac
- UKB on iMac
- UKB on iPhone 8plus
- UKB on iPhone 8plus
Of course, once the new mechanisms are in place, the focus will be on improving the content. In particular, now that the book I've been writing is out of the way, there are hundreds of images that I need to get onto UKB, and the species descriptions need updating
5. Look and feel
I've not changed the overall 'look and feel' of the website (although it would be very easy to now do this), since it is already perfect
6. What else?
So - while we're in this period of relative inactivity, unless you're Neil and hunting down Long-tailed Blues on a daily basis
, I'd like to know what other enhancements you'd like to see ... ?Cheers,
- Pete
). Many websites are too cluttered in my opinion.
