Yesterday we released a new version of My Opera, codenamed "Dragonfruit". Each of the important new features in the release will be explained in detail in the community blog. This is the detailed changeset for Dragonfruit:

• Add new "phototagging" feature to the photo albums. See the post in the community blog for more details.
  
• Add new "Customize Design" functionality (see "My Page" -> "Design" -> "Customize your design"). It allows you to customize your page background and header without knowing CSS. Note that you can't customize your page if you use the default theme! See the post in the community blog for more details.
  
• New full-screen slideshow feature for photo albums.
  
• Improvements in social network integration: now you have the possibility of sharing your blog posts automatically on Facebook. We also fixed some bugs.
  
• New autocomplete feature when sending PMs: just start writing the username of a friend, and a drop-down will appear with possible completions.
  
• Add a new cool feature to the friend invite page and the messages page: you can now select a range of messages by clicking the checkbox for the first in the range, then Shift-clicking the checkbox for the last in the range.
  
• Add a "Accept all friend requests" button.
  
• Fixed a problem with "Save draft" that would change publication dates for blog posts.
  
• Add Twingly ping support for blog posts.
  
• Publish blog updates on other social networks when blogging via MMS.
  
• Photo ratings are now shown to the owner.
  
• Fixed an issue with multiple choice answers in polls and the preview function.
  
• Now attached images in forums link to the original.
  
• Other small fixes and tweaks to the forums.
  
• Small fixes for the Link interface, particularly for notes and Mini/Mobile.
  
• Add a date selection widget to the events/countdowns, no more typing dates by hand. You'll need a browser supporting the "date" input type, such as Opera, to see it.
  
• Fix some issues with avatar resizing. Some issues still pending, currently looking at them. If you have concrete issues that are not fixed, please add a comment with a link to the original image.
  
• Small bug fixes for the wallpapers section.
  
• OEmbed bug fix: property "provider_name" is now correctly named (it used to be "provider").
  

And of course, a bunch of small fixes, tweaks and improvements everywhere in the site.

EDIT: I forgot to mention improvements in social network integration. Added now.

Hi! Today we're launching a new version of My Opera. We have a new fresh look, 1GB of free space, localized interface in 7 languages (and more coming soon), a friends activity feed, an API for embedding My Opera photos on other sites, slideshows for the photo albums and much more.

This time we also had a bit of beta testing along the way. Special thanks to dantesoft, Tamil, thobi, rose-marie, sgunhouse, remcolanting, coxy, BAMAToNE, WillYum and Ramunas for helping out.

Design

As the lead My Opera designer I wanted to give the new site a strong visual identity with that special Opera feeling. The goal was to make a simple and functional design that highligted the content rather than just beeing decorative. I also wanted to simplify the site and make it easier to access features such as Opera Link. The new design is also made to fit well with the upcoming launch of our new Opera.com site.

For those of you that write your own blog CSS, you might want to read about the HTML changes.

Mobiles

The new My Opera features many optimizations for mobiles and there's even a function where you can view the mobile optimized version by clicking a button at the bottom of each page. We hope that this will inspire those of you who have not yet tried out Opera's excellent mobile browsers!

If you are already using a mobile to browse My Opera you might notice that you will, in most cases, get the mobile optimized version by default. If you want the full version you can switch to it by clicking the button in the footer, but we recommend using the optimized version as it's not just mobile friendly CSS but also smaller images and less code to make it faster.

Localization

One of the main features of the new site is localization. I'll let our lead developer Cosimo say a few words about that:

We started working on localizing My Opera around March this year. Initially this was thought to be impossible very hard with the existing architecture, but we tried to build the internationalization engine to be as simple and standard as possible, planning and documenting even the limitations. It's based on gettext and PO files. We even worked ourselves on the translations, and of course the italian is mine. So you can complain to me for that one

In the long-term this has been a fairly good choice. In the meantime we also refined our internal tools. One is a command line application that converts the PO files that translators hand us into some ready-to-use code that is loaded at runtime by the application servers.

The integration with our templating engine has been a bit tricky, but now it works whatever templating system we will choose in the future. The most exciting thing about the I18N "layer" has been when I first saw My Opera translated in Japanese and Chinese. Really exciting!

Scalability

We have made a lot of front-end and back-end improvements to speed up the site and increase scalability. Cosimo:

Work on application code and backends has been frantic in the last months. Some of the improvements that we have introduced are:

• the skins section is much faster now, because all skin thumbnails are served statically using our new static.myopera.com server.
• we have a full-page cache now, so many of the most used My Opera pages are served statically now, with a fine-grained control of how/when a request can be cached. Basically we took the ~20 most used pages and we cached them completely. Then we update those cached version every now and then...

We know there's still a lot to do. We will concentrate on improving the database performance to avoid proxy errors. Specially since some of the new features (activities feed, etc) will stress the database even more!

We have good idea of what is failing and why, thanks to a cool ajax monitoring application we wrote in our "spare" time. If you are interested in our scalability challenges and how we plan to solve them, take a look at a talk I gave at the last Perl Workshop in Italy. It's slightly outdated, but you can get the basic ideas.

Friends feed

Another important goal for the new My Opera was to increase activity and make it easier for you to communicate with your friends and follow their activities on the site. One of the main features for this is the friends feed. The feed is activated when you and your friend have both added each other as friends on My Opera. It does not activate if it's just a one way friendship.

Looking ahead

We hope that you like the new My Opera. It might be a bit shaky the first few days, as we have released a lot of new code, but we are sure it will be great. A lot of work has gone into this release and we see this as a good platform to build on.

Finally, a big thanks to the entire My Opera team and all of you My Opera members that make this a great community!

Good news, everyone! We've been working hard fixing bugs and generally improving the My Opera community over the last couple of weeks.

Changelog

• You're now (again) able to edit and/or delete comments in blog posts either made by you or if you're a group moderator.
• Removing group members no longer results in an error message stating you're not authorized to do so.
• We've fixed a broken link in the forums about job annoucements.
• The broken link for watching the community blog has now been fixed.
• A new theme is available! Head over to your account, click on design, then scroll down to "Halloween".
• The top banner on My Opera has been changed to a halloween-themed one.
• "Choose Opera" blog posts are now also visible from the Opera section.
• The Opera section has been updated. We've added a new "Explore" menu section and moved the customize section to the sidebanner for better consistency.
• We've added an additional confirmation step when you're invited or want to join a group. This is a security fix to prevent people being automatically added to pesky spam groups.
• Fixed a bug in the photo albums which only affected users with non-ASCII characters in their username.
• It's now possible to remove all members of a group (including the creator).
• There will be NO MORE monkeys in error messages.
• We've fixed various CSS errors.
• Re-enabled the link for editing user CSS.
• Opera Link Web UI has been launched - This is a feature for viewing your bookmarks on the Web.

Today's release includes several fixes on My Opera. Some changes are visible, while others are not.

• The status field no longer displays your username on the blog-, about-, and info page. We also added support for cancelling a status update (you can either click on the "x" mark, or just hit "Esc" on your keyboard and the status field will disappear).
• We know many of you have received spam in your inbox, so we've added a feature where you can mark selected messages as spam, click on "Mark selected as spam" and they will be removed from your inbox to the spam folder.
• Photo management for albums with many (200+) pictures has now been fixed.
• Fixed member count for groups. Banned users were also counted as members from the "About" page, but they weren't in the member listing. The about page also includes that now.
• Delete comments no longer redirects to top of the blog post, but to the "Comments" section.
• Fixed issue with editing and deletion of comments in your own blog.
• Fixed newsfeeds and notification e-mails for dev.opera.com.
• Fixed the comment text area on the Desktop Team blog. It was sized incorrectly, causing it to overflow the background around it.
• Fixed the issue with forum search only showed one page of results when searching for posts. It was not possible to search for older posts as there was only one page of results. It now shows all.
• If you went to an album you didn't have permission to see, you were shown an empty page (no error message, no "authorization required", no nothing). It now displays correctly that you are not the owner of the album.
• BBcode and HTML is now turned off for anonymous user comments.
• Fixed error when trying to send message to a user with blank in username.
• You can now remove friends who have you on their ignore list.
• Fixed photoblogging watches, at last!
• When logged in you no longer see the signup form, but you can still review the My Opera membership terms and conditions. Also added some text changes.

That's it boys and girls.