Hi All,

You are probably looking at the navbar and wondering "What the heck??" right now... if not, then I bet you are now....

The following things have changed:

• The News dropdown now has 3 seperate news categories: Site News (for general info), Tech News (for tech and server info, ie my stuff) and Creator News (for challenges, creator guideline updates, etc)
• The News entries on the dropdown now link directly to the Site News forum, not About.php as before
• About has been moved down to the "Other" section of the News dropdown
• Live Chat has been removed off the News dropdown
• Site Issues has been removed off the News dropdown
• A new dropdown, "Site Links" has been added, which contains the New Posts, Site Map, and Quick Links links.
• Quick Links now no longer appear on the left of the navbar on the second row - they appear in a dropdown menu. This is cleaner and easier to have lots of links.
• The "Messages" indicator has moved from the right hand side of the navbar (Under User Tools) to the left (Under Home, News etc)
• Site Issues has been added to the Site Links dropdown
• Live Chat has been added to the Site Links dropdown
• New buttons have been added below the User Tools menu (where the old PM indicator used to be). These are dropdowns in and of themselves, linking to the other "main" sites that make up the MTSN (ModTheSimsNetwork).
• All Navbar menus are now grabbed via AJAX, saving some bandwidth and load on the servers - No they aren't becuase Firefox is officially utterly stupid and doesn't do something simple.

I realise that some of the changes may be a little annoying (one extra click to get to New Posts, and the moving of the PM indicator), but hopefully you'll agree that it makes things cleaner.

Having the MTSN buttons in the top right (which are also on S2C and SXS2 and soon to be on the wiki when I can beat the stylesheets into submission), means that it's much easier to see what is available on the other sites, as I think a lot of people aren't neccesarily aware of the things on S2C, or on the Wiki. It ties the sites more closely into each other which is always a good thing.

I hope you like the changes - and have a great day.

Regards,
Delphy

PS Becuase of the type of changes performed, I have not added the option to "revert" back to the previous layout minus buttons. This is entirely deliberate right now.

Delphy,

Love the changes...but I noticed that my news dropdown is still the same old drop down. All the rest are as they should be. - I did a refresh, should I try something else?

wndy26: Should be working now, I forgot to copy the actual .html file across

Looks great Delphy! Thanks a bunch!

Thanks for the changes delphy, they are great, I love The S2C and S2Wiki Menus!

Thanks~

Yes this is a good addition ! I like the general buttons (S2C and more) on the top. Thank you Delphy !

I appreciate the changes in the layout you've made. I think it will make it easier for most people to find things.

I do want to let you know though that I have so many quick links to special 'how to' posts that I've gone off the botom of the web page. It can be a bit difficult to get to the bottom ones and I do use them.

I like having the wiki links at the top. I see you've dropped healeane and sapphiresims and the other links section, or moved them somewhere else.

I guess I'll get use to it just like the other time you posted new news...

Love the changes! Thank you Delphy.

Thanks, I appreciate all you do for us!

Love the new links, but wouldn't it make more sense to put the messages back where they were and put the S2C, SS2, and Wiki links on the left? Kinda grouping all the like things together? Also, when I first clicked on those 3 buttons, I expected to get taken to their home page, but was instead taken to my control panel. Not quite as intuitive as I was expecting. That being said, I'm one person and I can just as easily shut up and get used to the awesome new changes too.

Phaenoh I have no idea why you would be taken to your control panel - I suspect that you moved the mouse and got into the User Tools menu instead.

I did originally try them out on the left but with all the other dropdowns it seemed very "busy", especially with the little icon too. It was far too easy to accidentally select any of the other menus since they are all on the left too. So I moved them to the right where there is only one other to interfere with.

porkypine, might I suggest if you have that many to clean some up Also, the hosted sites where never on the navbar... they are on the front page of downloads though. Oh and the other one appears only if you fulfill certain criteria...

I really like the quick links to the Wiki and S2C. Thanks for continuously making this site (and its sister sites) easier to navigate - much appreciated.

It is great having the three other sites more closely integrated into MTS2!

Ok, so I tried it again, and this time when I right clicked 'open in new tab' in firefox directly on the picture for each one, this page got opened in a new tab for me (last time i tried this i was on my control panel) maybe the picture itself (didn't get it through the drop down list) isn't set up to take you to the home page. or something.

I like the new changes quite a bit, the only thing is, I think it might have been a little cleaner to leave the pm info under the user controls and to put the new buttons on the left. I imagine though, that you probably wanted the buttons to appear in the same general area on all of the sites, so I guess this is more uniform.

Great idea linking them all together! Thanks!

Phaenoh, I think I figured out your issue.. First you need to click on either sexy sims2, or one of the other site pictures. After you do that a whole new drop down menu appears, thats when you can left click on one of the underlined things and hit open new tab and it will open a new tab directly to the site

I think I have found my bearings again now :D

One thing I am noticing though is that New Posts now gets me all new posts and is no longer filtered to just show my subscribed forums or threads. Is there a toggle for that somewhere, or has this filter simply been disabled for a technical reason?

Later: On closer inspection I find that New Posts under Site Links *does* work the same old way, but New Posts under User Tools shows all new posts without filtering. Is this intentional?

What are these numbers mean? The one next to the messages info? It seems to appear on the hompage only.




Also, I don't see the SXS2 link?

It may be age-related. People under a certain age may not see the link.

I'm well over 18

Ok and have you checked your profile to ensure that you have your date of birth filled in properly?

Yep, 1988. It's weird.....

Inge, thats always been the way it's worked - New Posts under Site Links is different from the one under User Tools. It's been like that for a good couple years.

treeag, There are other conditions on the SXS2 link, one of which is that you have to be older than you actually are... The number in the navbar in the home page is the online usercount.

musiquefile, please see my previous post as to why the buttons are where they are. I did try various positions till I found one that worked well

So you mean the age limit is not 18?