My Opera Development

A few weeks from now we will release a another My Opera update. In this post I will share some previews and tell you a bit about the background for making the changes.

The upcoming release contains a lot of small fixes and improvements, as always, but there will also be a bigger change to the site navigation. Simplifying the navigation is something we have been wanting to do for a long time now, because we have seen that a lot of people have problems navigating between their personal page and the community pages.

Remaking the navigation was a big challenge. However, it was quite clear to me from the start that the solution would be to have one unified menu at the top of all pages, but I was not sure how to make it look good on both the community pages and the personal blogs, until recently...

The first screenshot shows how the new navigation looks on the community pages. As you can see the black login bar at the top is gone and the main menu has changed into only three options: "My page", "Explore" and "Opera". Each menu item has a drop down menu with the most common links (yes, it also works without Javascript). Mobile browsers will show tabs instead of drop downs.

The last screenshot shows how the new menu looks on a personal blog. As you can see it's the exact same menu as on the community pages (just a bit smaller, to keep it unintrusive).

Having this unified menu at the top of all pages makes it much easier (and faster) to navigate between the different sections on the site. The logo and menu will also provide a stronger My Opera brand to all pages and make them look more like one community.

Some of you will surely ask: "What will happen to the top menu if I use my own CSS? Have you changed any HTML?".

Yes, we have changed the HTML for the top menu but it will still look fine on your page because we always include the menu CSS. The top menu will be available in a black and a white version, like before.

The new release also contains more exiting stuff. For example, we are moving the "spotlight" and "watch" buttons from the (no longer existing) black top bar into the page itself. This makes the buttons much more visible and hopefully more used..

Hi. This is the changelog for the recent My Opera update. It's a bit late, but better late than never, right?

Site redesign

The new design is made to be more light and fresh than the old one. We wanted to put focus on the content instead of the interface. The old interface had much stronger colors that took away the attention from the content.

When making the new design we decided to base it on pictures instead of text. We also wanted it to be more visual and have a personal feeling, and therefore we added more photos of the users.

Even though the new site design is more driven by pictures we still managed to make it lighter and faster to load. For example, the home page of My Opera is right now only 50% of the size that it was before the launch.

We also wanted the site to be better to use for mobiles and other devices. We optimized the code and made sure to use smaller pictures where possible to decrease the loading times.

The new site is also optimized for Nintendo Wii. You can actually see what it looks like by adding ?wii=true at the end of the url (example). As you can see the width of the site changes for Nintendo Wii to fit the TV screen, the font sizes are larger and there's only a two column layout.

Another big change for the site is that we moved the account section from the personal blog area to the community area. This might take some time to get used to but we hope that it will work out fine. We did it for several good reasons.

One of the reasons is that we are planning to add more features/services to My Opera in the future, and these things might not be directly connected to the personal blogs. Therefore it's better if the account pages are more integrated with the community design than the personal blog design. Another reason is that it's now easier and faster for both you and us to create new blog designs, since we don't need to worry about reinventing the account pages for each design anymore.

The people section

One of the major features of the new site is the people section. Here you can see the latest logged in users and browse your way though their user profiles. There's also a simple user search available.

In the people section you can also find My Opera member interviews. We have gathered a small team of dedicated My Opera members to help us with the interviewing.

Customizable sidebar and new features

We have added some new features to the blog sidebar, and you can easily disable individual components by clicking "my account" and selecting "sidebars and menus".

The new sidebar features are:

• Friends - Shows 6 random persons from your friends list.
• Latest blog comments - Shows the 6 latest comments in your blog.
• Recent visitors - Shows the 6 latest visitors to your page.
  If you do not want to be visible in these lists (as well as the list on the new people page, which shows last logins), you will have to set the 'logged in' setting in your profile to 'hide'.

New top bar

The log in bar at the top of each My Opera page is now a bit different. [view code example]. You can currently choose between black or white color. It can be changed on the "sidebars and menus" page in your account.

We know that the topbar can potentially cause problems for some of you that have 100% customized designs, and we are looking into giving you more options.

Forums

The forums has a new design, just like the rest of the site. We have tried making it a bit more userfriendly. In-topic forum searches have been fixed and we have tried to improve forum searches in general. Results should now be better.

You can now also post inline images directly in forum posts. The images are visible for anyone who wants to see it, and others will see a link. To enable inline images, go to the forums page, click "my settings" and then check the box saying "allow inline images".

Local vs Global

On the old blogs page there was a lot of mixed blog posts in many different languages. For the most of us, who don't read/speak 35 different languages , this was a problem. We have therefore introduced something we call local vs global. When you visit the blogs page you will now see posts that are based on your selected language settings. If you want to see all posts you can click the "global" tab.

This feature is still under development and there's some work to do to get it better. But we think we're on the right track.

Signup and accessibility

We have made quite a lot of improvements to the signup pages. They have some nice AJAX features that helps new users signing up. We have also improved the accessibility of the signup page by switching the image based captcha to a text based one.

Other Changes

The last real My Opera update was in November. Since then we have made tons of changes. We can't list them all here, but below is a list of a few more things we have fixed. The next update should hopefully not take too long. We'll try to have many small updates in the future, instead of a few big ones.

• A serious bug with regards to tagging has been resolved, which occationally introduced tag duplication.
• Blog searches are now using proper fulltext searches, something which should make them more efficient and better.
• Large photo albums are now broken up into pages when editing, hopefully eliminating some of the problems with editing large albums. Feedback appreciated.
• We are now using scripts from Yahoo! UI Library for the photo sorting page.
• Timezone offsets no longer broken for Indian users (and others with half-hour offsets).
• Improvements to the blog post URL name suggester.
• Added 2 new 'insert image' buttons to the blog post editor
• Groups can now select 'forums' as default page.
• Blog feeds now include excerpt properly.
• 'Logged in' status on users' about pages didn't work properly. This has been fixed.
• Siginificant optimizations and forward-thinking changes to the underlying database schemas.
• Introducing memcached driven caching of minor amounts of data. To be expanded greatly.
• Backend code refactoring and cleanups which should hopefully not result in any visible changes .

Finally we want thank everyone for the great feedback!