Version 2.10
Release Date: June 21, 2021
- Search — Make Y2K filter an option rather than requirement
- Search — Repair bug involving double-quotes for matching phrases
- Search — Add Honor Roll entries
- Companies — Add the ability to merge duplicate entries for a company
- Donors — Repair bug allowing post editors to indicate donors
- Date Tool — Repair defect showing 'January 1' when MM/DD unknown
- Moderation — Do not allow blank titles for submitted quotes
- Honor Roll — Add gender option 'NB', remove option 'other'
- Honor Roll — Add 'filter by gender' and 'sort by DOB' for browsing
- Honor Roll — Repair 'sort by Z-A' option
- Honor Roll — Repair logic conflicts around 'still alive' and 'date of death' fields
- Database — Use global search-and-replace to fix '’' in entries
Version 2.9
Release Date: May 4, 2021
- Donors — Bulk add/rename/delete sponsorships of individual posts
- Database — Add ability to merge types of hardware/software/companies
- Moderation — Allow 'delete all by this author' for spam prevention
- Moderation — Empty workbench of all pending entries
- Moderation — Correct error confusing author vs. editor in moderation notices
- Copy Writing — Adjust text in moderation emails to be more polite
- Copy Writing — Explain transition away from post-Y2K content
- Research — Add content from research on Video Games, Mobile Phones
Version 2.8
Release Date: March 14, 2021
- Search — Filter results to products and events on or before December 31, 2000
- Research — Find more Analog Computers, CPUs, Mobile Phones, Video Games
- Platform — Update Drupal to latest minor version without changing major release
- Platform — Update all plugins and extensions
- Platform — Bugfixes to blog posts, email notifications, new user management
Version 2.7
Release Date: December 22, 2017
- Search — Refine results of text searches, according to data type
- Database — Major cleanup of hardware and software taxonomies
- Database — Data type of "Company Type" changed to single item
- Landmarks — Booleans will allow items to be flagged as historical milestones
- Landmarks — Can be within a specific Company, a Product Type, or significant to all IT.
- Landmarks — Only "historians" can change "landmark" status of an item
- Landmarks — Until we build our "landmarks" database, it will be hidden from guest users
- UX — Minor changes and debugging
Version 2.6
Release Date: November 6, 2017
- Anti-Spam — "Add/Edit Article" and "Add Company" now require special "historian" permission
- Date Picker — Now always uses "textedit" field instead of dropdown menu for specifying years
- UX — Blue box soliciting add/edit now uses less screen real estate
- UX — "Submit" button now correctly specifies "submit for moderation" or "publish to live site"
- UX — Publishers have clearer moderation tools, including red "delete" button
- UX — Comma added to "Welcome, username!" message
- UX — Home Page "Browse" button goes to a page offering six databases, instead of defaulting to hardware
- UX — Upon login, users are taken to a page offering to create various types of content
- UX — Personal Profile editor cleaned up considerably
- Responsive Display — Defects at tablet size have been repaired
- Responsive Display — Defects in Firefox have been repaired
- Responsive Display — Menu bar now has line+shadow underneath for visual clarity
- Add/Edit — Blog Article editor now has clearer UI for uploading images
- Add/Edit — Resource data fields now better organized
- Add/Edit — Quote data fields now better organized
- Blog Sidebar — Now has nicer buttons inviting browsing our databases
- Blog Sidebar — Now suppressed on phone-sized devices, to avoid clutter
Version 2.5
Release Date: September 25, 2017
- Navigation — Re-style desktop navigation completely
- Navigation — Re-style tablet navigation
- Navigation — Re-style phone navigation
- Navigation — Add "blog" to primary nav (hardware/software/etc.)
- Navigation — When scrolled down, "search" is always visible
- Navigation — Fix top-of-nav spacing problem on administrative views
- Navigation — Use icons for data types (hardware, software) on tablet/mobile
- Spam Blocking — Spammy accounts are auto-deleted regularly
- Spam Blocking — Add/Edit blog content requires different permission than db
- Content — remove slider from home page
- Content — four buttons on home page should link to hardware/sofware/etc.
- UX — Add/Edit blog entries now triggers moderation sequence
Version 2.4
Release Date: July 12, 2017
- Content — restore missing blog posts
- Spam Blocking — blog post comments handled by Disqus instead of Drupal
- Spam Blocking — delete unverified accounts after 24 hours
- Spam Blocking — only people with 'editor' permission can publish to blog
- UX — fix "shuffle" feature on Quotes and Honor Roll pages
- UX — fix "squished images" problem for horizontal-format images on Honor Roll page
- UX — fix bug in "date tool" on "submit new company" page
- UX — fix bugs in CAPTCHA
- UX — fix bugs in moderation workflow
- UX — fix display bug with apostrophes on Honor Roll pages
- UX — fix header language to differentiate between "search" and "search results"
- UX — fix JS infinite-scroll tool
- UX — fix spacing on mobile version of faceted searches
- UX — additional/clearer icons for different data types on "search results"
- UX — aesthetic alignment improvements on "date picker" and "image uploader" tools
- UX — allow Honor Roll page to show only entries with photos
- UX — by default, browse oldest entries first
- UX — change "main nav" sequence to begin with "hardware" and include "blog"
- UX — change URL routing from "resource-sites" to "resources"
- UX — email links inline, rather than in "footnote format"
- UX — hide email addresses on /members pages
- UX — if there are multiple information sources for an entry, each needs Title+URL
- UX — show db size "search found ____" entries on all 'browse' pages
- UX — suppress "author" and "creation date" to remove clutter from "search results"
Version 2.3
Release Date: December 15, 2016
Minor Changes:
- Content — repair missing entries on "Board of Directors"
- Database — add ability to export "companies" and "honor roll" as .csv
Version 2.2
Release Date: September 1, 2016
- UX — clarify new user registration
- UX — notify editors when new submissions/edits arrive
- UX — clarify moderation emails to authors (your entry is awaiting moderation or accepted/rejected)
- Spam Blocking — Set up IP blacklist
- Spam Blocking — Implement better CAPTCHA
- Spam Blocking — require email authentication within 24hrs
- Debug — repair JS scrolling bug that was introduced when we started allowing the sharing of faceted searches
- Misc — hide email addresses of CEOs on the "company" pages
- Misc — perform a one-time export of member db for Mailchimp
Version 2.1
Release Date: May 13, 2016
Major Changes:
- Migrate Blog from old site — The old WordPress blog has been reproduced on the new site - including the recent obit for Andy Grove
- Migrate Users from old site — Several dozen user accounts from the old site have been recreated on the new site. (Passwords will have been reset.)
- Faceted Searches Described — When browsing hardware or software, there is now grammatically articulate text describing the exact search criteria at any time.
- Faceted Searches Can Be Shared — When applying facets to a search (such as 'manufactured by Intel'), the URI is now updated to reflect the search query. Therefore, interesting sets of search results can now be shared via copy-and-paste.
Minor Changes:
- Configure 'SendGrid' Email — For the site to have outgoing email (including notifications such as new account creation and password reset), we set up service with a third-party provider. Pricing is free if our volume is low.
- Configure 'SOLR' Search Server — 'Search' was working on the test site, but failing on the live server. This has been repaired.
- Better OpenGraph Data on Home Page — Previously, sharing 'www.ithistory.org' on a site like Facebook would show a preview with bad 'title' and 'description' text. For instance it said the page title was 'Front Page' instead of 'IT History Society'. New writing makes more sense and describes the mission concisely.
- Better Text on Blog Sidebar — Previously, when reading an individual blog post the sidebar displayed placeholder text. Now there's a short description of ITHS, as well as links to the databases. Could still use graphical improvement.
- Better Blog List — When looking at a list of blog posts, show the author's real name ('John Smith') rather than userid ('jsmith'). Also use the 'thumbnail' field to choose images for display. And some adjustments were made to the layout to make better use of available space.
- Better Text on 'Contact Us' — The form for emailing an inquiry had placeholder text; now it describes the organization better.
- Better CTAs — The blue buttons on 'single item' views now say 'Add hardware to our database' (whichever data type is appropriate to that view) instead of the old 'contribute to this page', which was confusing and might have been mistaken for meaning 'donate money'.
- Dual Role on 'Board' — On the /board page, Jeffery Stein is now visible as both Chairman and as a Board Member. Previously a bug prevented this.
- Validated Users — We have a new 'role' that admins can assign to user accounts, called 'validated' - which we can use to indicate accounts which have been explicitly marked by humans as being non-spam-related.
- Random Order Quotes — On the 'quotes' database, the option to sort randomly was failing. Now it works; refresh the page and you'll see a different list.
- Images Missing on Static Pages — Four of the static pages had bad URLs left over from the transition from 'test server' to 'live server'. They have been repaired.
- Single Items Without Images — On the 'single item' view, entries without images had an awkward empty space; now there is a border and text saying 'no image'. Hopefully this may encourage visitors to upload images of their own in some of these cases.
- 404s in Footer — Corrected minor bug relating to footer URLs for 'Terms of Use' and 'Privacy Policy'
- Better Search Results — Larger icons to show what type(s) of data each search returned
- Better Share Buttons — Tweaked placement of social sharing buttons to add whitespace
- Better Mobile Search Results — Suppressed the 'date modified' and 'author' and 'text preview' on phones, because too much clutter
- Honor Roll Cleanup — Some names had erroneous 'node field' text in them; all were manually inspected and cleaned.
- Update Site Modules — Update every Drupal module and extension to the latest version (staying within Drupal7).
Version 2.0.1
Release Date: March 28, 2016
- Board Members — Photos added for each Board Member or Trustee, page allows 'refine' via JS
- Home Page — New Slider graphics and text describe the organization better
- Logo Placement — Minor tweak to whitespace around logo in title bar
- Member Benefits — Graphical page articulates different tiers of donations
- Sharing Tool — Switched away from "shareaholic"; implemented "addthis" instead
Version 2.0
Release Date: February 5, 2016
- Total Rebuild—Transition to Drupal7 (previous site was written in PHP without an MVC framework)
- New Skin — Database contents are displayed with larger and more prominent images. Typography and layout updated to be more contemporary
- Responsive Design — Site optimized for display on desktop, laptop, tablet, or mobile
- SEO-Friendly — All pages of db contents now have unique and SEO-friendly URLs
- Social-Friendly — All pages of db contents have "share" buttons, and OpenGraph metadata to facilitate sharing photos
- Comment Section — All pages of db contents can have threaded comments, which may be "voted up or down". (implementation via Disqus)
- Faceted Search — Add the ability to refine searches (e.g. by Manufacturer, Product Type)
- Sort Order — Added the option to display results in chronological order
- Anyone Can Edit — Anyone can create an account that enables submission of entries or edits
- Moderated Edits — Requested changes go into a queue, to be approved/declined by official ITHS editors
