We are pleased to announce a few subtle but important site-feature changes accomplished so far this week. We've been listening closely to your feedback on the DevNet 2.0 Web Site Forum, and have been able to make some progress towards acheiving some of the requests for enhancements around the site.
We are constantly taking in all of the feedback giving each request ample consideration and prioritizing them into our project plan. Needless to say, the project plan is long and extensive, and very ambitious towards accomplishing a much better and unified set of communication channels serving our communities needs.
This week we've made improvements to the Search Results page, New Forum Topic page and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) capabilities on the forums.
Search
Searching for content on DevNet today is leaps and bounds greater than what it used to be. No longer do you have to go to two or three seperate locations to search on topics that are near to your current interests, there's one primary location to seach site-wide. Whether interested in articles, blog posts, forums topics, downloads or videos, our search capabilities reach far and wide and aggregate all of the matching terms located throughout the site, and even from our TFS bug-tracking system.
One of the most recent changes to our Search Results page is so subtle that you may not immediately spot it in the following image. The rectangle circling the filters does give it away, but do you see it? OK, I'll come back to that in a second. Another subtle but more obvious change is that there are now indicators that show you how many matching hits there are from each of the site-areas. Now you can see how many candidates there are that meet your search criteria.
The initial subtle change I was referring to is the fact that you only see filters for areas that actually contain results. No longer are all of the site search filters present, forcing you to guess which areas contain results or forcing you to scroll down and discover which areas do in fact have results. Only areas of the site that contain information matching your search term will appear.
Future search enhancements will include: better paging; product-issue (bugs) results for all versions of SuperOffice - not just the latest 7 and 7.1; new filters for frequently asked questions and product documentation. There is a long way to go and we'll get there in due time.
Forums
One of the biggest requests we've had about the forums is the ability to subscribe to all of the latest forum changes by a single globel RSS feed. Well we've taken the feedback to heart and now have that available for you.
In each club, on each one of the forum landing page, you will now see a RSS box that will give you all of the latest forum posts in a single RSS feed.
This is so far only available on a club-by-club basis, and therefore, if you want feeds from all forums in both the technical and developer clubs, then you will have to subscribe to both of these club-specific forum feeds.
Future forum enhancements include the ability to receive emails when new posts are appended to your individual topics, as well as topics that interest you. You'll also have the ability to specify whether these notification are sent to your email inbox or your devnet inbox, or both.
We do have plans to expose more RSS feeds that expose global site-wide changes, including more than just forum posts. We will eventually include a site-wide feed that will notify you of all change on the site, whether its a new article or news item, forum or blog post and new videos and resources.
We are working to make the site more proactive and notifying you of changes, rather than you having to come and endlessly navigating around looking for new additions.
Tags
When it comes to creating blog and forum content, please do not underestimate the power of tagging your content. Whether it's a new topic on the forums or a blog post about your favorite new feature or API, please use tagging to categorize your contribution.
We've now fixed the Tags textbox so that when you start to type a new tag, the autocomplete shows you a list of suggestions. We are confident this will help eliminate creating "near-duplicates" that decrease the effectiveness of the tag cloud - which is a great way to search for relevent content.
Future plans include displaying a tag cloud of the most popular keywords under the Tags textbox, making it easier to just click on the words to add terms to the Tag textbox. If the text you want to use to categorize you content isn't in the most popular tags, then autocomplete will still work for you.
We've also modified the tag search results page as well. Now when you click on a tag, you'll get all matching contributions with that tag, and paging to view them all.
You can continue to click on tags that interest you in the tag cloud above, and find more contributions that interest you.
Conclusion
We are nowhere near done improving the experience, empowering our community, and serving your needs - to help your do what you best.
Use the DevNet 2.0 Web Site forum to discuss any concerns you may have. Make suggestions, and most importantly, lets keep the communication channels open.