Written by Stuart on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 in News

If you have been visiting WPscoop this week you will have noticed some major changes happening on the site, for one we have a great new design for the main site and blog which we think you will agree is a vast improvement over our old design. We have also updated the system upon which WPscoop is built (Drupal) to version 6 which is something we have been wanting to do for a few months now. Lot’s of hours, coffee and bug squashing went in to the sites upgrade and we hope you all like the improvements we have made to WPscoop.

I thought this post would be a nice chance to give some history about WPscoop and tell you all about the new updates we have made to the site.

Wpscoop eventually launched in September of last year and was based upon Drupal 5 which is an OpenSource CMS system, i say eventually as we had originally started developing the site using the Pligg system. After spending around four weeks developing the site it became increasingly apparent that Pligg simply wasn’t a robust or expandable enough system that would allow us to expand and scale features in the future. This was our back to the drawing board moment and when we ultimately decided Drupal was the system we should use to develop Wpscoop.

When we decided on Drupal i had initially only toyed around with the system but had never actually used it in a live environment for any sites that i had worked upon either professionally or personally. As you would expect i am a Wordpress Fanatic so Drupal was pretty alien to me in many ways although it was a much more configurable and complete system than Pligg had been. In the beginning it was a steep learning curve and working long hours after my day job i eventually launched the first version of WPscoop in September 2008.

To be honest the first version was functional but looked clunky with a quickly edited stock drupal theme, at the time i wasn’t 100% happy the site but didn’t as yet understand Drupal enough to create our own custom theme.

After a while running WPscoop life and work commitments started eating into the time i could spend working on the project and the site went stale for a few months, we also suffered some hosting problems during this time which combined with work and life commitments didn’t help with my enthusiasm for the site.

This brings us to today however when we officially Launch WPscoop v2.0 :)

A fews weeks ago life started to return to normal and i finally found the time to site down and completely redesign WPscoop along with upgrading it to version 6 of the Drupal system. The result of that redesign as you can see are now live on this blog and our main bookmarking site, hopefully you all like the new design and like us will think it’s a vast improvement over the old one.

WPscoop Old v1.0 Screenshot

wpscoop_old

WPscoop New v2.0 Screenshot

wpscoop-v2.0

I still have some work to do on both the main WPscoop site and this blog not least of all complete the mainsite user profile pages, they are about 80% done but need to complete and then test them some more before placing them live. We also have still to construct a new logo as most of what we have tried so far we don’t really like as yet so the current logo you see is only a temporary affair.

Whilst the site is in testing for a few weeks we have disabled our dynamic javascript external vote buttons for you blog etc, this is to check our main system is stable before allowing others to embed content from WPscoop on their own site. The external javascript top stories widget has also been disable for the moment.

I will discuss a few of  the new features in greater detail later next week.

WPscoop was born out of my aim to create a site where like minded wordpress users like mysef can collate, discover and save wordpress content that they like. I hope you all enjoy the new site.

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6 Comments

  1. bbrian017 says:
    July 25, 2009 at 12:14 pm

    It would be cool to see you using our blogengage badge!

    http://www.blogengage.com/profile_promo.php

    The site is looking amazing hope to see you submitting in the future!

    Thanks,

    Brian

    Reply
  2. Jeffro says:
    July 26, 2009 at 12:30 am

    So that’s what happened to you and this site. I’ve been stopping by every now and then and noticed that stories were becoming more and more outdated and the frontpage was filled with nothing but archived content. I hope you can turn that around by making it as easy as possible to submit new stories to WPScoop. There are a few of these WordPress – Digg like sites around and none of them have taken off. Good luck :)

    Reply
    • Stuart says:
      July 26, 2009 at 12:35 pm

      Hi Jeffro,

      Thanks for wishing me luck with the project, greatly appreciated.

      Next week we hope to have all our tools sections update with more way to easily submit links to WPscoop along with a new more configurable wordpress plugin.

      At the moment the fastest way to submit links directly from your browser to WPscoop can be found here in the guise of our Browser Submit Button ;)

      Hope to see you around the place in the future.

      Reply
  3. Alex Vorn says:
    July 26, 2009 at 7:47 am

    Hi Stuart! Cool design I see you have here!
    Good luck~

    Reply

TrackBacks / PingBacks

  1. WPscoop The Wordpress Social News Site Launches v2.0 | Social CMS Buzz says:
    August 12, 2009 at 10:24 am

    [...] the site to the public which sports a brand new custom design along with a major site upgrade. In a blog post at WPscoop Stuart explains more about the sites update and also writes about why Drigg was chosen [...]

    Reply

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