Welcome to the new Wetpixel.com!  Over the past few years, Wetpixel has grown from a basic news listing site into the premier online resource for underwater digital photography.  Our community of registered members is over 3,000 strong, and we have many times that number in regular, anonymous visitors.

The new design is based on an advanced, multi-blog engine, which will allow us to participate more in the main content areas of the site.  More importantly, it is now very easy to browse back in time through our archives.  Wetpixel now even has RSS and Atom feeds, so you don’t have to manually check our front page to look for new content.

Note: Your old login and password should continue to work, but if it doesn’t, go to the lost password page and fill out your username and on-screen code.  You will then receive an e-mail with a confirmation link that you must click on.  On the confirmation page, you have to enter two pieces of information: your user ID (a number, provided in the e-mail), and confirmation code (also provided in the e-mail).

For feedback during the migration period, please use the migration thread in our forums.

—- New Features / Notes—-

Archives

It is now very easy to look back through Wetpixel’s news, reviews, features, and location reports.  Like before, every article also has easy-to-read, printable versions.

RSS/Atom Feeds

Wetpixel now has RSS and Atom feeds.  The links to these feeds can be found at the bottom of the page.  Point your feed aggregator at Wetpixel, and you no longer have to poll the front page for new content!

Login Consistency

One of the most frustrating “undocumented features” of the old Wetpixel was the Random Logout feature.  This should no longer happen.

Performance

Wetpixel is now running on its own dedicated dual-processor server.  Once I finish tweaking the site for performance, it should feel much more zippy than before.

Community Galleries

The new forum software we’re running on (which, incidentally, is a new version of what we ran a long time ago) supports photo galleries explicitly.  This means that as members, you can more easily post images for critique and presentation.  You can also create and share your own albums, send e-cards, and bookmark your favorite images.

Community Blogs

Every Wetpixel member can now create a locally hosted blog.

Anti-Spam

If your e-mail address appears in comments or in posts on the front page, they will be encoded in a way that fools web crawlers.

—- Migration Notes—-

Logging In

You will note that even though there are login and logout links on the main Wetpixel page, all of the actual logging in and out occurs in the forum area of the site.  After you log in or out, just click on the Wetpixel logo to get back to the main site.  I apologize the this inconvenience, but there is currently no good way to get around it.

Picture of the Week

The picture of the week feature is sort of in flux at the moment.  For now, we are going to run it like Steve does over at Steve’s Digicams, but we’ll work on getting public voting (and prizes) up and running again.

Classified Ads

The classified ads area as been moved back into the forums.

Forum Issues

There are a few major issues with the migration to new forum software, which will make things a little inconvenient during the migration.

- Forum attachments

... are no longer linked to their respective messages.  I’ve put all of the old image attachments online so you can poke around if you are looking for a specific image: [old images] [really old images]

- Avatar images

... have been lost, so you’ll have to re-upload them.  I’ve also put these online for you to find: [old avatars]

- BBCode and forum .sigs

... BBCode is what we use to change the look of text, etc., in the forums.  All BBCode has been migrated over properly, but for some reason the actual rendering of the code doesn’t show up unless the message is edited and re-saved.  This is easy enough to do, so if you come across one of your posts with unrendered BBCode (which looks like [ b ]bold text[ /b ] instead of bold text), go ahead hit “edit” and then “save”.

——-

Let me know if you have any questions about issues I haven’t covered here!  I’m really excited about the redesign. It’s taken hours and hours of hard work, and I couldn’t have done it without James Wiseman, Markus Nolf, and Alex King.  Thanks, guys, for the help. :)

On the next page, I’ll discuss the steps that went into the redesign, coding, and migration.