Page last updated: March 14 2010.

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.

  • Tutorial filtering feature for findability, integrated on right sidebar. – Priority: High.
  • Filtering by level of difficulty and tools used. – Priority: High.
  • Subscribe to comments via email – 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

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 0.2.6 – 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