Gandi Bar

Static pages

Many of you have requested the addition of what we call "static pages" that you can add that can be visited from your blog's sidebar.

We have therefore added these, and made them as easy to use as possible. The interface is therefore a 'light' version of the one used to create blog entries, and is without a only few features:

• No categories
• No outgoing trackbacks
• No tags

We have kept some of the same features as the blog entries however:

• A list of pages
• A page to create or modify pages
• Comments and trackbacks are possible on a page
• A page can be protected by a password
• One can add media to a page just like with the blog entries

Comments left on the page will be displayed in the general comments list (with an indication next to the title). Comments are also filtered by the anti-spam system.

A new theme that can be customized by default

This was brought up in the previous post concerning GandiBlog, but it is worthy of being discussed again.

This new version of GandiBlog has a new default theme called Blowup. This theme is accompanied by a plugin that allows you to easily configure it. You can therefore chose the color of the test, the links, as well as their size and font. You can also change some of the background colors (page, comments).

You will have the leisure of choosing a banner image from and if none of the eclectic choices are appealing toyou, you can use your own image.

If you are having difficulties being inspired, you may choose a predefined style or use it as the starting point of your work. Finally, you may share your styles with others by simple copy and pasting your code in your blog or in forms.

To conclude, if you do not know any CSS or want to learn all these barbaric things, this theme just what you need. I will even mention that an employee of Gandi used this theme - though I will not mention any names

Ergonomic improvements

The article composition zone has been improved, mainly with regards to the text editor. The presentation and the homogeneity of the editor on the page has been improved. The editor now has a button that allows you to generate a link to another blog entry. For example, if you would like to refer to a recent article, you can simply click on the insertion link, choose the entre from the list (using the search engine if necessary) and voilà!

The management of tags is improving. You now have the ability to delete a tag: either for all the blog entries that use it, or just a couple.

A list of tags that exist at the time you are writing a new entry is now available, just as when you are modifying an existing entry.

You will also notice that you may now export all or part of your media manager to a zip file. This was made available during the previous update, I simply forgot to mention it.

New online help

The presentation of the contextualized help has been totally revisited. The little nearly invisible question marks have been replaced by a very clear button on the upper-right corner of each page that has a special help section. Clicking on the button will display the help contents (and another click will hide it). The help information will be displayd right over the content: this is unfortunately not a bug, but a limitation of a web browser whose name I will withhold.

Performance and spam

GandiBlog has seen a diverse range of performance problems for various reasons. The main one is the constant flooding of the database with comment spam. A new filter was put in place that will verify the origin if the trackbacks. The data that we have receiving shows that this works very well and blocks a large majority of the trackback spam (which represents nearly all of the comment spam).

Note that as of now, we systematically delete all spam that is is older than 7 days.

Many of you now use, or have tried out GandiBlog. This success therefore means that we need to continue developing our platform. The network team is looking at all the various solutions that can be implemented in order to improve GandiBlog performance even more.