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Written by Super User

Category: Recent Changes

Published: 10 February 2012

Last Updated: 10 February 2012

Hits: 154

User Rating: 0 / 5

First off I should apologize for not keeping this “Recent Changes” category of articles up-to-date. I’ve been too busy making the changes (and fixing bugs that might come up because of them) to actually take the time to explain.

I suppose the most obvious change is the “new look”. We have changed templates to what I think is a much cleaner and attractive user interface.

Another change has been in the content of the Home Page. The Home Page now contains “Featured Articles” from all categories – sorted by date, with the most recent first. Featured articles are articles that contain member comments or have been tagged as "featured" by management.

Many of the extensions used at liberalroundup.com have been updated to the latest versions, including the Joomla! core (now running v.2.5) and Kunena Forum (now running v.1.7.2).

I’ve also have been tweaking the “mini-news” articles that appear as modules and are designed to include the latest or most read articles in whatever category is currently being viewed.

The Kunena DiscussBot (which has been tweaked to include in a slider beneath each article) now also displays the actual comments for that article – and you are able to add comments without actually going into the Forum.

We have added a gallery of images in the top heading that consists of thumbnails of images contained in articles in the category being viewed. A mouse-over hover will display the article title and clicking the image will take you directly to a full-view of the article. Unfortunately not all articles contain images, so those articles won’t appear at all in the heading. The images are sorted and displayed by latest date with “Featured Articles” shown first.

When viewing an article in full-page view, there are 2 new modules shown beneath the article. One shows a list of “Related Articles” (based on keywords found in that article). The other module is a list of Articles from the same author. (If either of these modules contains no related list, they are not shown at all.)

That’s about all I can think of at the moment – though there have been many other improvements and tweaks made over the past few weeks - all designed with you, the end-user, in mind.

As always, feel free to provide feedback and suggestions for ways to make your online experience at lberalroundup.com more enjoyable.

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Written by Super User

Category: Recent Changes

Published: 09 January 2012

Last Updated: 09 January 2012

Hits: 228

User Rating: 0 / 5

To lighten things up a bit around here, we have added a catgegory for Political Humor. The link to the blog layout can be found in the "Seriously Funny Stuff" menu module in the top right column on the Home Page.

To allow discussions ob th earticles, a new "Political Humor" category has also been added to the Forums.

We have also included a new module containing political cartoons that will be displayed at the bottom of the page.

The rss feed is from Kick. Enjoy!

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Written by Super User

Category: Recent Changes

Published: 21 December 2011

Last Updated: 21 December 2011

Hits: 266

User Rating: 0 / 5

A new module has been added that will publish random quotes. These quotes can be taken from an article (by "category") or a list of lines in a text file.

So I found a website that provides an RSS feed to "Inspirational Quotes". By using the same software that gets our article feeds, I created a new article category ("Quotes) that will gather the Inspiration Quotes as new ones are added to the rss feed and save them to our database. I then tweaked the new module so that rather than using the article title, it uses the contents of those articles (the quotes themselves) and displays the quote from a random record in a module on the right column. To be honest, personally, it's not that I'm all that moved by or in agreement with "inspirational quotes" - it is being used as more of a "fill" for the right column than anything else. Some users might enjoy reading them - and it beats fiilling some blank real estate at liberalroundup.com with annoying or misleading Google Ads.

I also have created a new "Tips" category and will begin writing some user "Tips of the day" articles for that category. I will use the new "Random Quotes" module to display a random "tip" article (using a clone of the new module that is configured to use the Tips category). That module will be shown at the "bottom" module position at the bottom-center of the page. I may include the "Add Tips" option that is part of the new module and allows users to add suggested tips via a link to a form that will be shown at the bottom of the module.

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Written by Super User

Category: Recent Changes

Published: 10 December 2011

Last Updated: 10 December 2011

Hits: 308

User Rating: 0 / 5

We have added a new "Related Articles" module that will be displayed beneath each article. This module is only shown when the view mode is "Article View" (i.e. an article is open for full view).

This will allow for quick links to the last 5 articles published in all categories matching relevent related keywords, and includes a list of the keywords found in each linked article. A mouse-over tooltip popup will also display the intro text from any article in the list.

Another reason for adding this feature is because we have begun to impliment meta tags in all our RSS feed articles. Meta Tags are simply key words or phrases that are used by search engines to locate related links. This should help gain further traffic via any search engine.

Read more: Related Articles and Keywords