We’re excited to announce the latest release for our IntenseDebate.com interface redesign: your brand new Admin Panel and Blog Account pages. We’re sure that you’ve noticed the unmistakable design changes to the Blog Overview, Moderation, Comment History, Plugins, Settings and Layout, and Tools pages, and we think you’ll agree that it’s a major improvement!

Over the past weeks we have released redesigns for our homepage, your User Account page, and your account Dashboard and Following page.  These releases feature our new sidebar navigation. So far your feedback has been excellent, and we’re pleased to hear that you’ve found it to be much improved (we were told that it was “life changing” and we agree!).

Our old blog account pages were definitely due for an overhaul, especially the Settings page.  That was our go-to page when we introduced new admin features, and admittedly it was getting a bit crowded.  The redesign embraces the sidebar and has split your old Blog Settings into a couple of different tabs:

• Blog Account overview: manage email notification settings, blog title and RSS.
• Moderation: for all of your spam and moderation management tools.
• Layout: customize your comment section components and language options.
• Comments: manage Facebook Connect, Twitter Sign-in, along with all of your other comment settings.
• Custom CSS: this is a brand new tab where you can style and add new CSS to your comment section without having to upload files anywhere!
• Miscellaneous: customize your comment links among other elements.

Give it a try and let us know what you think! There’s more to come (especially for our moderation page) so keep an eye on our blog for more info.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Our last blog post announced our redesign of the Edit Profile pages where you manage your IntenseDebate user account. We’ve continued to make our way across other pages in your IntenseDebate.com account, and we’re pleased to introduce our latest redesigns of your account Dashboard and Following pages.

Your Dashboard has had an overhaul and a bit of a face lift to match the new design style, while the Following page has been reorganized and is now easier to maintain.

One of the most noticeable changes to the layout is the sidebar. We’ve added additional tabs to the sidebar for your Dashboard and Following pages, which we think drastically improves ease of navigation. This is a theme that you will continue to see as we set our sights on your blog admin pages.

The coolest part about our redesign is that this is giving us a chance to cleanup and update our CSS and other background code, which fits in with our future plans for localizing IntenseDebate.com. We have just begun our localization project for the comment section interface, so localizing IntenseDebate.com is a longer-term project. Keep an eye out for another localization progress update coming soon.

We’re rolling this out slowly to minimize shell-shock that normally accompanies major interface changes. We’re always interested in feedback, so let us know what you think about the redesign.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

One of our ongoing projects has been revamping all of the useful pages in your account at IntenseDebate.com.  We’ll be the first to admit it, there’s a ton of awesome features in your profile but they need to be better organized so you can find them all!  We don’t want you to be overwhelmed with too many sudden changes, so we’ve been rolling out small changes over the past several weeks, some of which have likely gone unnoticed, until now…

We have released two major changes. The first is our stylish new home page at IntenseDebate.com. Since you have to be logged out of your IntenseDebate account in order to see the front page (click here to logout), you might not have noticed that one. But, the next change you will undoubtedly notice when you’re logged into your account, and that’s your shiny new Edit Profile page.

So what’s new?
It’s all about the layout. On our old profile pages we just crammed in as much as we could. We would release new features like our Twitter integration (tweet this & latest tweets) or our Gravatar support and we would squeeze it into the old page. Now we’ve organized it a bit more sensibly.  In your Profile Panel you’ll find the following:

• Account Page: here you can manage your basic account settings like your username, email address, OpenID, password, and email notification options.
• User Profile Page: your display name, profile description, and your personal websites (linked to in your profile) are all located here.
• User Picture: manage your Gravatar or IntenseDebate avatar.
• Services: this is where you can manage all of your 3rd party services that you link to in your profile, as well as your Twitter account integration.

We think you’ll agree that this is a major improvement.  Hats off to Isaac and Jon for their work!  Keep an eye for more changes as we continue to make our way across IntenseDebate.com. 🙂

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Yet another revision of the IntenseDebate WordPress plugin is here.  So what’s different?  Quite a bit…

The most notable change is in the initial registration.  We’ve completely rebuilt the interface for initial registration of your blog with IntenseDebate to help make the process even easier and better explain what is happening during this one-time registration to clear up some confusion that was circling around the previous versions.  Below are a couple of screenshots of the new registration:

We’ve also addressed some display bugs when using our plugin with the latest 2.7 release of WordPress.

Additionally, we continue to improve the syncing between IntenseDebate and WordPress. We’ve now added a method to help us detect if your blog ends up out of sync with IntenseDebate and automatically correct the issue.

And last but not least we’ve heard your cries for XHTML validation and made some improvements to the code to address this, as well as alleviating some plugin conflicts with a handful of other plugins that conflicted with the previous version of our plugin.

If you’re an existing plugin user you can update from your Plugins page in your blog’s WordPress admin panel.  If not (or if you prefer to upgrade yourself) you can download the plugin here.  As always, give us your feedback!  We’d love to hear what you think and any suggestions you might have for making the integration with WordPress even better.

Posted by Jon Fox in WordPress Plugin

Our WordPress beta plugin is running better than ever! We have released the latest version of the IntenseDebate beta plugin for download so please upgrade your plugin. If you haven’t given IntenseDebate a try yet, then now is the perfect time!

What’s new?
Version 2.0.16 includes the following bug fixes and feature improvements:

• WordPress comments on mobile devices: We’ve added the ability to easily degrade back to the standard WordPress comment system for mobile browsers.  Not all mobile browsers support Javascript and this allows your mobile users to still get the full comment experience with the WordPress comment system, and our syncing features, while still having IntenseDebate enabled. Our mobile browsing feature is enabled by default and is located in your plugin settings page.

• Importing: We’ve added some fixes for the initial import which should help eliminate some of the errors people were receiving before.

• Theme Compatibilities: Some users were having issues with their theme being broken after activating our plugin.  In most of these cases the issue was caused by <noscript> tags in the comments template.  We’ve now added a check to catch this issue and output a stock comments template instead to prevent this issue in the future.

• We’ve also fixed a handful of bugs around the syncing process to make this system better than ever.

Thanks again for all of the great feedback. Keep it coming, we are always looking to improve our plugin. In addition to any feature enhancements, please contact us with any bug reports or styling issues and we’ll get everything taken care of.

Posted by Michael Koenig in WordPress Plugin