The New Adaptistration: More Than Just A Facelift

Welcome to Adaptistration’s new blogging platform where enhancements are more than skin deep. In addition to a new interface and updated graphics, the new platform offers a wealth of fresh features and vastly improved functionality over the old platform…

The Comfort Of Familiarity

First, all of your favorite resources are still around, none of the original content or source material has been removed. In fact, what used to be divided between multiple column headings can now be easily located via the “Resources and Annual Events” icons located in the right-hand column. You can also search the entire site via the search function located in the top, right-hand corner of the blog and signing up for the Adaptistration Weekly Email Summaries has never been easier; there’s a form located directly on the main page at the top of the right-hand column!

Recent comments are still around, located toward the bottom of the right-hand column and you can still subscribe to individual comment feeds at each respective post as well as subscribe to an overall blog comment feed.

NEW FEATURES

• Latest article glider: this is perhaps the most obvious change to Adaptistration’s layout. Here, you can flip through the five most recent articles. Subsequent articles are automatically relocated to the “More Articles” section, located in the center column as new articles are published.
• Print feature: at the top of each article and page, you’ll notice a little printer icon. Not only does this feature provide a printer-friendly black and white version of the article but it strips out all pics and lists the full text version for each embedded URL as a footnote! It even inserts all necessary attribution material so you can print out any article for employees or students without worrying about copyright issues or taking the time to manually insert attribution material. Piint. Click. Print. How cool is that?
• Gravatar
  integration: You’ll notice that some of the readers who post comments have an avatar or photo associated with their comment. This is an automatic feature and in order to take advantage all you have to do is set up a free gravatar.com account and make sure to use that email address when leaving your comment.
• An auto-generated site map.
• A new RSS feed
  (make sure to update your records although old feed URLs should continue to work for the next several months).
• Enhanced translation tools: located in the right-hand column.
• Expanded social networking links: located in the left-hand column.
• Popularity plug-in: this nifty feature automatically ranks posts via a special algorithm. You can then access a list of the most popular articles via the tabbed right-hand column widget (just click on the “popular” tab).
• Related post feature: when visiting a specific post page, the new platform will automatically list the five most recent articles from that same category at the top of the right-hand column. This is a fabulous feature for a blog with as much material as Adaptistration!
• Improved image galleries: this is a wonderful tool for readers that enable the author to insert entire photo galleries into posts that display as flash based slideshow viewer. You can see the gallery feature in action via the preview pics at the Orchestra Compensation Report page.
• Integrated polling tools: no more third party polling script, which means polls are much easier to create and post!

ON THE HORIZON

• Quizzes.
• Individual post and page rating.
• Improved video and podcasting tools.
• Special subscribers features.

The really fantastic part about using the WordPress platform is that functionality and user features are always in development and since it is based on an open-source architecture, readers can always explore options on their own. As such, let me know if there’s a blog feature out there you wish Adaptistration would use; after all, user input is one of the key components to creating a great blog!