Page last updated: OCT 03 2012

Upcoming Features, Changes & Bug Fixes

This is a running list of things we’d like to work on in the future. If you have suggestions of things we should add to the list, head over to the Contact page, grab our contact information, and then let us have it. This is a site for you, and we want to make it as awesome as we possibly can so that you can enjoy the hours you spend on here. We might not add your feature request to the list, but we can guarantee you that we’ll listen with an open mind.

Stuff in this list will eventually move to the Changelog section (below) when they’re done or be removed and never to be seen again if we decide that the feature isn’t needed.

  • Add comment feature on Upcoming Features page to allow reader feedback and suggestions.
  • Tutorial filtering feature for findability, integrated on right sidebar. – Priority: High.
  • Filtering by level of difficulty and tools used. – Priority: High.
  • Display tutorial overview on each tutorial that lists user rating, level of difficulty, tools used. – Priority: High.
  • User rating features for tutorials. – Priority: High.
  • Related Content display in posts for findability. – Priority: High.
  • Better Archive page with sorting & filtering for level of difficulty, tool/s used, date published, number of comments, user rating, etc. for findability. Priority: High.
  • Display regular contributing authors on About page for acknowledgment of their awesome work. – Priority: High.
  • Comment rating feature (vote up or bury) to maintain and encourage high quality discussions. Auto-deletion of comments with many user buries. – Priority: High.
  • WordPress optimization: reduce function calls that can be converted to static markup. – Priority: High.
  • Integrate Flickr user group showcase on sidebar. – Priority: High.
  • Delicious bookmarking feed displayed on sidebar to share design-related news. – Priority: Medium.
  • Site sponsoring/advertisements to generate income for site costs and tutorial writers. See Advertise page for status on this upcoming change. Priority: Low.
  • Contact web form. We prefer it old school (email) or really old school (snail mail). – Priority: Low.
  • Freebies filtering and sorting by type for findability (brushes, vectors, textures, etc.) – Priority: Low.
  • Migrate assets to Content Delivery Network for faster page response times – Priority: Low.
  • Better site search feature (possibly Yahoo! Search BOSS integration). – Priority: Low.
  • Hammer out rendering bugs for IE6. – Priority: Low to Never.
  • Some day/maybe: Subscribe by Email. – Priority: Low to Never.

Changelog of Design Instruct

Version 0.3.4 – Oct 3 2012

  • Changed home page <title> element to "Design Instruct" from "Design Instruct: A Web Magazine for Designers and Digital Artists"
  • Updated Copyright year on footer to "2010-1012"
  • Fixed Delicious bookmark at the bottom of posts
  • Removed "Write for us" text widget from sidebar
  • Removed "The Best of Design Instruct" eBooks banner at the sidebar
  • Removed "The Best of Design Instruct" eBooks link at the top of the web pages
  • Removed "howto" as a meta keywords attribute value
  • Removed meta generator attribute

Version 0.3.3 – Sept 13 2011

  • Change site search to Google Search Engine (better search results).
  • Add Facebook like button on sidebar.
  • Update “Become a fan on Facebook” footer link’s href to https://www.facebook.com/DesignInstruct
  • Remove “We’re Hiring!” graphic on the “Write for Us” widget on the sidebar.
  • Revise “Write for Us” widget copy to include articles along with tutorials.

Version 0.3.2 – Sept 07 2011

  • Fixed issue with search button on sidebar where previously it didn’t respond to mouse clicks.

Version 0.3.1 – May 03 2011

Version 0.3 – Dec 17 2010

  • Moved Content Delivery Network to reliable, faster service (MaxCDN)

Version 0.2.9.8 – Dec 2 2010

  • Added Square Banner – Middle Right ad zone on sidebar
  • Removed Digg button from posts
  • Converted TweetMeme retweet button to official Twitter Tweet Button
  • Updated Facebook button to Like button

Version 0.2.9.7 – Nov 17 2010

  • Increased comment threading level to 4

Version 0.2.9.6 – Oct 23 2010

Version 0.2.9.5 – Aug 22 2010

  • Add ad zone 1 on sidebar
  • Remove Flickr group link from sidebar (declutter/simplify)

Version 0.2.9.4 – Jul 27 2010

  • Fix Internet Explorer CSS specificity issue where the <thead> row of tables were not showing the background color
  • Set width of all tables to 610px to match width of content images.

Version 0.2.9.3 – Jun 26 2010

  • Fix pagination navigation at the bottom so that black square with dots is consistent with the site design. (span.extend.)
  • Move Text Effects category to be a subcategory of Graphic Design
  • Remove Special Effects category and Photo Effects category
  • Revise category sidebar navigation menu to reflect change in site’s information architecture

Version 0.2.9.2 – Jun 9 2010

  • Fix main navigation About and Contact link items so that their href property is /about/ and /contact/ instead of /about and /contact

Version 0.2.9.1 – Jun 3 2010

Version 0.2.9 – Jun 1 2010

  • Fix HTML markup issue where post excerpt on the front page was being nested inside two <p> elements
  • Fix HTML markup issue with #searchsubmit ID being used more than once on sidebar.

This is our (feeble) attempt to catalog every feature that we add, changes that we’ve done, and bugs that we’ve managed to squash on Design Instruct.

Version 0.2.8 – May 28 2010

  • Disable directory listing via Apache

Version 0.2.7 – Apr 1 2010

  • Added option for subscribing to comments via email to get notified of new comments on a post
  • Added new Freebie subcategory: Icons
  • Fix bug with page titles displaying the text %blog_title%
  • Updated styles of pagination links at the bottom to match site theme better
  • Remove "Part #" text on paginated sections

Version 0.2.6 – Mar 14 2010

  • Design Instruct Authors comment avatars are now highlighted with a special color
  • Design Instruct Author comments now displays their title
  • Design Instruct Editor comments now displays their title
  • Updated template of comment form so that "(required)" text of the comment label is inside span.deemphasize for consistency with other labels
  • Adjusted vertical alignment of comments text (div.the-comment) by 5px to align with comment author’s name
  • Adjusted margin of unordered list elements (ul) to have top and bottom margins equal to paragraph elements (p)

Version 0.2.5 – Feb 23 2010

  • Added trailing slashes (/) on the About and Contact page menu links href attribute values
  • Updated global stylesheet to add blockquote styling
  • Fixed bug on Comment RSS Feed link at the bottom of comment form causing extra slash (/), which redirected users to the main feed instead of the comment RSS feed

Version 0.2.4 – Feb 21 2010

Version 0.2.3 – Feb 20 2010

  • Added link to Flickr group pool in footer section, under "Connect with Us"
  • Revised copyright text in footer section
  • Revised home page title to " Design Instruct: A Web Magazine for Designers and Digital Artists"

Version 0.2.2 – Feb 19 2010

  • Fixed bug where post comments feed were being incorrectly static-cached, causing the feeds to become invalid

Version 0.2.1 – Feb 18 2010

  • Updated stylesheet of pagination navigation to better match Design Instruct’s web layout
  • Added Textures subcategory under Freebies parent category

Version 0.2 – Feb 15 2010

  • Newer and better RSS feed that displays a post’s thumbnail, excerpt, and a preview of the tutorial (suggested by Ramin), see the discussion on the comments for the need for this change
  • Implemented static disk caching to improve page load times: tests after 10 trials each reported a 259.1% speed improvement for total page load (9.56 seconds without static disk caching, 3.69 seconds with static disk caching)
  • Enabled social media bookmarking buttons in each post (Digg, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Delicious)
  • Enabled pagination to navigate to older posts
  • Automatic tweets of new content: Twitter followers will get a tweet as soon as RSS feed is updated
  • Implemented better comment spam protection against automated spam to maintain comments quality for the Design Instruct community
  • Design Instruct team comment avatars are now highlighted with a special color
  • Added Sitemaps XML to help search engine crawlers index the site
  • Added link to comments RSS feed to allow users to subscribe and be notified when a comment is posted
  • Added subscriber count on the footer using FeedBurner FeedCount
  • Revised the About page content to show clearer information about Design Instruct
  • Revised page footer content, under section "Write for Us"
  • Added 5 entries to the Our Friends page (PSDBURN, Denis Designs, Dawghouse Design Studio, Abduzeedo, Just Creative Design)
  • Updated all WordPress plugins to their most current versions
  • Updated WordPress to its most current version (2.9.1)
  • Updated global stylesheet to display unordered list item bullets as square
  • Fixed bug causing extra nested paragraph in the posts’ introduction text
  • Fixed bug where tabbing order of comment form was incorrect

Version 0.1.2 – Feb 02 2010

Version 0.1.1 – Jan 27 2010

Version 0.1 – Jan 26 2010