Every second week we release small My Opera updates, but once in a while we make something bigger. At the end of this summer we will release a big My Opera update, and we want to share a preview of the new site with you.

Design

The first thing you will notice with the new My Opera is the new look. It has a black menu with a red border, and some new graphics as you can see in this small preview.

We wanted a fresh look that was more similar to opera.com than the current My Opera, with the goal to strengthen the Opera brand and provide a consistent user experience across our sites.

The design is also made to have a similar look and feel for both mobiles and desktop computers.

Secure log in and Opera Link

Log in, sign up and Opera Link are now secure https pages. This is the first of several steps to improve the security on My Opera.

Navigation

The main menu has been simplified and has only 3 links to the main sections. Each menu link has a dropdown so you can reach the sub sections fast:

• Your name (For example "Mike Johnson")
  This section contains all your things. Your latest news, your blog, your photos, friends and bookmarks.

• Community
  All community related things. Community news, latest blogs, photos, members and groups.

• Opera
  All Opera related things. The Choose Opera blog, Opera Link, forums, skins and wallpapers.

There are also icons in the menu for settings, messages, comments and friend requests.

Home

The Home page has been redesigned and simplified. The latest activities feed is now more compact and each element take up less space.

In the side column you can see your photo, quick links to useful things such as uploading photos, your groups, and more.

The big news on the home page is that we have replaced the status field with a quick blog function*.

You can see a small preview of the quickblog function here. It allows you to easily post in your blog. You can also choose to write posts without a blog title, which can be useful for fast and simple mobile blogging.

If you want to see all the blog tools you can click the "show blog tools" button.

*The status field is still available in the sidebar, if you are connected to Facebook/Twitter.

Mobile friendly

On the current My Opera we have two sets of style sheets, one for the mobile version and one for the desktop version. This is no longer needed for the new site because it will only be one version. It's just one version that automatically adapt itself to fit your screensize in the best way using CSS media queries.

One example to illustrate this is to look at the menu. If you have a small screen the menu will adapt itself to look like this. The dropdowns will fold out below each link, even in Opera Mini.

Blogs

The new My Opera menu is displayed at the top of all pages.

If you are surfing with a mobile you will see a big difference in the blogs, as they will now look the same as they do for desktop. This means that you can now customize the blog design even for mobiles.

The default blog theme is replaced and it's now an updated version of the Opera theme. Some blog themes have been updated, and some of them are discontinued to leave space for new ones.

We have simplified the blog navigation to work better for mobiles and give the page a lighter feeling. The menu links are now:

• Blog
• Photos
• Links
• Friends
• About

Favorites and Archive can be reached from the sidebar, and Opera Unite is now available as its own section in the top Opera menu.

The quick blog function is available directly on the first page of the blog, for fast and efficient blogging.

If you write a post without a title, the post date will serve as a link to the actual post, and if you share your posts on Facebook/Twitter we will auto generate a title based on the first part of your post.

It will no longer say "No comments" on the posts where you have not yet recieved any comments. We only show the comment link when there is comments, or for logged in users who wants to write something.

In addition to this we have made a number of bug fixes,and made sure that embedding of Youtube HD videos fits better into the main area of the page.

Photos

Several new things are available on the photo pages. First of all you will see that the albums are now listed in two columns instead of one, and the album descriptions are placed inside each album.

We got a new function that shows the latest image comments in the sidebar. This replaces the old album list and makes the page more up to date with the latest activity in focus.

The photo uploader has also been completely redesigned and simplified a lot, to make it easier for you to upload your photos.

One big news for groups is that the name and picture of each album creator is displayed at the top of each album. This makes it more personal and easier to see who has uploaded photos, specially in big groups such as 365.

Latest community blogs & photos

The pages showing the latest blogs & photos from all members have been redesigned.

We have added two new pages to help you find the good stuff. One page for showing the most subscribed bloggers and one for the most subscribed photographers. Who do you think is at the top of the list with most active subscribers?

The pages for "most visited" and "top rated" photos are now merged into just one section called "popular".

Opera

Selected news from all Opera blogs are highlighted directly on the My Opera Home page and Opera page. This will make it easier for new visitors to find blogs such as the Desktop Team blog and the Opera Mini blog.

The pages for Opera skins, Speed Dial background, wallpapers and buttons have been reorganized and are now more closely linked to each other.

There's also a new page for Opera Unite.

Forums

The first page of the forums have been redesigned to make it easier for new visitors to find the right place to post. More experienced forum users still have the option of visiting a page that lists all sub forums at once.

The forums mostly looks the same as previously, with the exception of the "forum thread" page where we redesigned the posts so that the avatar and name are displayed above the post content. This is made so that the forum can work better for mobiles.

The forum settings are now available on the general settings page.

Account details & settings

The pages where you can edit your account details and settings have been redesigned and got new shiny icons. You can see a part of the account page in this small picture.

Web standards

With the new My Opera we want to show some of the latest and greatest of Opera's standard support. For example, the menus are completely made with CSS 3, with box-shadows, transitions and more.

We are also switching one part of My Opera to a new framework. We will run the Catalyst framework and Template Toolkit on the community photos page. This page will be pure HTML 5, and this is the first small step toward converting all pages on My Opera to HTML 5.

That's all for this time

Yes, that's all for this time. The new site will be launched after the summer. We will show you more when the launch get closer. Now have a good summer, and remember to upload your best summer photos to My Opera!

Best regards,
Fredrik Andersson
My Opera Lead Designer