At the point of this writing, we have a little more than 5 hours left before we upload our new Wizzley design. Wizzley will be down for approx. 2 hours, at 1 AM CDT (US Central Time), early Friday morning (TONIGHT). Notice the countdown on the front page (when you're logged in)?
Anyway, we wanted to give you a description of the major changes you can expect. Here goes ...
1. The top ad unit will automatically adjust to the length of your intro text. Ideally, your intro has 100 words (or more) for a full-size ad block. If you don't have an intro at all, only a small, single ad can be shown. It may be worth your time to go back to your older articles and use part or all of your first text module as intro.
2. We've removed the "Rearrange modules" widget from the side bar (in edit mode). At the same time, the side bar now remains in view as you scroll down the page, and any new modules will be added where ever your cursor is currently positioned. To manually move a module onto a different location (all the way down, or to the top, or anywhere else), simply left-click on the module header and drag it into place.
3. We completely removed the Donation option. The technical requirements and administrative effort was not really feasible, considering how little this feature was being used. In the coming weeks, we'll get together on the forum and decide how we want to dispose of the funds we have accumulated so far.
4. We retired the Wikipedia and Code-Modules and turned existing content into regular text modules. The Wiki module didn't really contribute anything but convenient, duplicate content. Most folks misunderstood the Code module, thinking it could be used to execute scripts, flash or other code snippets on the page. In actuality, this module was intended solely to display code snippets, but not to actually execute them.
5. While updating ALL modules and adjusting them to our new design, we were very careful to not break anything on your existing articles. However, if you have created complex two-column designs on one or more of your older articles, you may want to take a quick look and see if they need adjustments.
6. Tables are still allowed within text modules although the editor buttons have been removed. We'd also rather discourage the use of tables unless absolutely necessary, since they might not display well in mobile browsers. In most cases, simple lists are a safer option to display your data consistently across different browsers.
7. The image location of our referral banners has changed. If you embedded these on your own websites without changing the URL these would need to be changed. The old URLs contained a "/basic/" in the path, so if you remove this part then you should be good.
Incidentally, we are not too thrilled with seeing these banners on your Wizzley articles. They are intended to help you drive traffic to your Wizzley articles by making others aware of the site, but tend to look rather tacky on the pages of Wizzley itself.
We would like to kindly ask you to remove such banners and refrain from using them for this purpose in the future. It would be much more acceptable (and effective to boot) if you link to related articles with your referral link, instead of garishly soliciting sign-ups and possibly devaluing the content of your excellent article.
8. In the Amazon module, "list with product description" has been integrated into just "list". You'll still find all the display options. It's simpler that way.
9. Apparently, hardly anyone ever used "print view", so we removed this function.
10. For a faster loading speed, we optimized our social buttons as well. No more bubble counts - except for facebook and Wizzley thumbs. In addition, you will now see right away if you've already given a thumbs-up.
Best of all - we'll have a new, streamlined, modern, attractive look and feel.
We hope you'll agree.