Developer diary: Release 6.1

Hello users,

Today we have released version 6.1 codenamed "Structural change".

Filters

In the new release we have made some changes to the front page and added new filter options such as post type, topics or sorting. We want to make the homepage the most important page again. The filters can be combined in any way you like. For example: Show me all tutorials on 'Microsoft' and sort them by page views or number of comments. You can also specify a time frame.

Search

The search box can be combined with filters. For example, you can search for "Proxmox" only in the "Linux" topic. A new feature is the ability to sort search results by date. Relevance is not taken into account. All posts containing the search term will be displayed sorted by date. This has been requested by several users. In the future, the right column of the search will dynamically adapt to the search term, taking into account elements such as users, comments and topics. This will happen over the next few weeks. Until then, you will still see the placeholder 'Hotly Discussed'. We have also simplified the navigation in the search results (more/back/next instead of page: 1,2,3 etc).

Top Posts

For the permanent filter view, we have reduced the number of top posts, i.e. the teaser images with the headlines at the top of the page, by 3. An attempt will now be made to avoid showing the same topic images until the algorithm fails due to a lack of alternatives and randomly mixes the topics. This should rarely happen, however. The content of the top posts now adapts to the filter setting. For example: With the 'Tutorials' filter, the top tutorials will appear; with the 'News' filter, the top news will appear, etc.

News

The 'News' section (and important information) has been added to the new filter on the homepage. As we discuss news and information quite often, and new posts are regularly added by users, this section has been given its own overview and will be more visible and important. The news overview is also easily accessible via the URL: /news

Topics

Our topics will have their own URL (previously they were accessed via the 'tag' parameter). The new URL is '/t/topic_name'. This makes it very easy to jump directly to a topic, e.g. '/t/linux'. We are following the trend here.

Once a topic has been selected, the information on the right-hand side, e.g. 'Hotly Discussed', will be updated to reflect the content of that topic. This means that only the posts that appear in the topic are taken into account. This is now done in real time, without caching. More top lists will be added at a later date to the right of the threads.

Other small but important changes

The main menu 'Instructions' has been replaced by our 'Stream'. I think the stream still has a lot of potential and we will improve it in the future (new look etc). Instructions can now be found directly in the filter on the front page.
We have removed the 'Experience Report' post type. You can now choose between 'General' and 'IMHO'. Existing testimonials will remain, of course.
The /latest/ and /discover/ pages have been removed in favour of the front page. The URLs are redirected to the front page.
We have removed the pulldown next to the search in the ticker. It is not needed there.

As always, you can find all the new features in our Release Notes.

I hope you like the changes and look forward to your feedback or a click on the heart