There is a lot here. Almost all the data from the old site and 100% of the articles, forum posts, file download, pictures, etc. We promise it’s all here – we don’t, and can’t, promise it all works the same. I would suggest start with a few house keeping items. First – it’s a good time to update your profile.
Click the My Profile link in the upper right. This is in essence how the site and your fellow members see you. One bit of data we haven’t migrated yet is the ratings – feel free to update. We will get those copied over – but if you have edited it we’ll leave them alone. Also a great time to make sure your contact information is current.
You can also look at the Settings link on the upper right. It’s a bit confusing – think of your Profile as about how others see you – the Settings are about how you see and interact with the site. There’s some overlap. Your profile can show a profile picture on your profile but you have to upload it through settings.
So another point – the new site allows having an avator and a profile picture. The profile picture is a medium size picture that you can put up on your profile. Your avatar is a small picture that shows up with any of your posts or comments. It can be a little real picture or anything you choose to represent yourself.
Next I would just work the main “Nav Bar” (the big blue bar starting with Home in the upper left). Go through each area of the site. The fixed menu is gone. We’ve put the top half-dozen or so things everyone uses in the Nav Bar. The menu below will vary depending on where you are and below that you’ll have some “breadcrumbs” that will make it easy to keep track of where you are at and move around.
We have some technical limitations (really learning curve) so we don’t have the chat box embedded on every page – so for you you can always get at it via the Chat Box link.
One more thing to touch on is the CMS (content managment system) – this is the collection of articles that are on the home page and reached from the article tree on the left side. The new software allows forum like commenting threads on individual articles so there’s not as much need to create seperate forum topics to talk about specific articles.
By default a nice WYSIWIG editor is enabled for all of the compose boxes. If this causes problems with your browser you can enable a simpler version or go back to a pure HTML text box by adjusting under your settings. We have noticed that when cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word (only) to the fancy compose box there are problems if the post has embedded quotation charecters – but it’s easy to edit and repost if needed.
So explore, kick around and communicate. But most of all – have fun.