New Resources

For those not monitoring the website like a hawk (as I tend to), you may not have noticed some of the new features, posts, or people that have shown up lately.

New Website Features

There have been a few new tidbits added to the site.

News Aggregator

In an effort to incorporate more of the wider community within this website, I've added an aggregator to pull in various content feeds from around the globe. Please put in the comments any suggested additional feeds.
-Planet ProjectPier: Primarily aimed to pulling in discussion and blog posts from various members in the community. If you're regularly talking about projectpier, you should probably be here.
-ProjectPier Talk: Aimed at pulling in the chatter from various other networks and services that our community uses around the internet such as del.icio.us, flickr, etc.

Content Formating

I have tried to make it easier to format your posts in the forums. Everyone should now have an option to choose how their input will be displayed.

1. The default is to use plain text and optionally selected HTML tags.
2. The alternative is to use Markdown syntax. Previously I had tried to combine them, but was causing issues so it is now seperated
3. Others: I am also looking to provide support for bbcode and maybe Textile, but would appreciate some feedback on what people want to use
4. Code/PHP tags: Also a reminder that you can wrap any code/variables/error messages with <code>...</code> tags or <?php ... ?> and it will get special attention and proper formatting.

New Projects

There have also been some new projects added. In addition to the recently popular Marine Theme, we have the new Zura1 Theme and the author has told me he is preparing a second one soon. There has also been a new Russian Translation added and an Italian Translation collaborated on. Another user has also contacted me regarding adding a Hebrew Translation, so look for that in the near future.

Other Upcoming additions

Collaborative Handbook Editing, Mailing List Integration, New Web Site Design....

New Resource

After some prodding and support from the community, I have setup an IRC channel on the Freenode Network - #projectpier - which is already proving very useful. You can use this channel to talk about development of ProjectPier and to get real time support help, or just hang out/chat with other ProjectPier users. I'll try to post up some details/instructions for beginners soon. Feel free to ask (or contribute) for help.

New People - Welcome a New Core Committer!

I'm very happy to announce that Michael Knight, aka miknight (or jedi on IRC), has been chosen to be a new core committer and a maintainer for the upcoming 0.8.5 release.

Michael was chosen because he has demonstrated his commitment to the project and shown his good judgment and regular support of the community. (and it doesn't hurt that he also happens to live in Sydney close to me)

This means he will have commit privileges to 0.8.5 branch or until that branch is created, to the repository trunk. He will be assisting me in getting 0.8.5 out the door and once that version is released will be responsible for committing any bug fixes or security patches and releasing those updates. I personally want to express my appreciation to Michael for his work so far, and I hope the rest of the community will join me in thanking him for taking on this role. Thank you!

I'm still looking for more people to fill other important roles in ProjectPier, so contact me if you are interested in stepping up.