Why We’ve Been Offline: Welcome to the New, Improved Vamped!

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The views stop here. What you would have seen trying to access Vamped on April 30.

If you’ve wondered why our hasn’t been accessible since April 30, it’s because I flipped on an “offline” setting to hide work on our new layout. Surprise!

We’ve been formulating the site’s redesign for several months. The site’s last major overhaul took place on June 9, 2015.

Before I write a sequel to this post explaining our site’s new features, I wanted to showcase what Vamped looked like right before the changes took place. Here’s what what our homepage looked like until yesterday:

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Homepage layout. We used a customised MH Themes’ “Newsdesk” theme.

If you clicked on the pagination at the bottom of the page, the latest posts grid would vanish off the next page and beyond:

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Turn the page. Pages after the homepage had no latest posts grid.

As to the articles themselves, here’s a typical post layout:

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A typical post. Note different items in sidebar. “Related Articles,” seen at the bottom of the post, usually came in threes—this particular article didn’t have enough tags (“Topics”) to generate more.

If you clicked on an article author’s name, you’d get a display like this:

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Author listing. Some of the articles my colleague, Erin Chapman, has written for the site.

But if you wanted to choose a category from the navigation bar, it looked like this:

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Navigation menu dropdown. The “Entertainment” category is our most extensive section.

If you clicked on one of the categories, in this case, “Entertainment,” the display would look like this:

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Category display. Notice the similarity to the homepage layout, specifically the latest posts grid at the top.

One of the previous layout’s best features was its sitemap, located at the bottom of the first column of the site’s footer:

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Sitemap page. Especially handy for determining how many posts were written in a given month—a source I used to compile our “Monthly Digests.”

Clicking on one of the months listed in “Archives” showed the following:

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Posts for April 2016. Slim pickings that month, but our lowest is a tie: May and June 2014 only saw one post each. Our post prolific month was September 2014 with 12 posts.

But whenever major changes take place, there’s still bound to be transitional hiccups. We encountered ours after noticing a log-in window pop up whenever we accessed an article, after the theme was installed:

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A login to view articles. Very jarring and completely unnecessary. The issue is being investigated.

You don’t actually need to log in to view the articles; clicking “Cancel” took you to it with no problem. Logging in would be pointless anyway; only admins have a password. Bloody thing.

We’re working on it, so the site has been switched back to offline mode until the matter’s fixed. In the meantime, stay tuned for my post explaining the overhaul changes.

Notes:

  1. June 9, 2015: Anthony Hogg, “Another Major Overhaul: 6 Significant Changes for Vamped,” Vamped, June 9, 2015, accessed April 29, 2016, http://vamped.org/2015/06/09/another-major-overhaul/. archive.is link: https://archive.is/h3ia9.
  2. what our homepage looked like until yesterday: archive.is link: https://archive.is/WLya0 [accessed April 29, 2016].
  3. clicked on the pagination: archive.is link: https://archive.is/fQdbF [accessed April 29, 2016].
  4. a typical post layout: archive.is link: https://archive.is/FI5g2 [accessed April 29, 2016]. Example used is Erin Chapman, “How Did the Blade Rave Go? A Follow-Up,” Vamped, March 9, 2016, http://vamped.org/2016/03/09/blade-rave-follow-up/.
  5. clicked on an article author’s name: archive.is link: https://archive.is/pXo8x [accessed April 30, 2016].
  6. clicked on one of the categories: archive.is link: https://archive.is/QPnyA [accessed April 29, 2016].
  7. the previous layout’s best features was its sitemap: archive.is link: https://archive.is/PL1sb [accessed April 29, 2016].
  8. Clicking on one of the months: archive.is link: https://archive.is/cWnEb [accessed April 30, 2016].