IKEAFANS is proud (and relieved) to announce the launch of IKEAFANS 4.0.  This upgrade has been a long time coming and represents over a year of work on the part of your tireless administrators, James and Susan. 

 New features include: 

 BLOGS (these will be there):

This is going to be a two phase process. I've been wanting to move to a different Blog system for quite a while, but we've been waiting and waiting and WAITING for a new release that would add functionality we really want folks to have. We're about out of time though, so I think we're going to have to roll out with the current version of the new Blog system and upgrade ASAP once the new release is available.

The new Blog system is much cleaner and faster, with much better optimization to get them flagged in the Search engines so folks should get more exposure. And we've got a way worked out so that the Blog posts will show up in the Recent Posts etc.

EXPANDED MEMBER PROFILES (these will be there at launch)

The member profiles will be much more useful and will contain some social networking aspects so that you can form groups of friends as well as creating public groups for folks that share common interests, location etc.

NEW FORUM FEATURES (these will be there at launch)

There will be new ways to organize threads via both thread prefixes and tagging. We're thinking about combining *some* of the forums (probably only a few) and using thread prefix to indicate the type of thread. Other uses for thread prefixes would be for doing things like flagging cerayin threads as kitchen plan discussion threads by having a prefix "Kitchen Plan" that can be selected, so you could quickly and easily pull up a list of all Kitchen Plan threads just by sorting for that. Lots of others ways prefixes could be useful. Tagging will be (obviously) more free form and will be kinda hit/miss, but hey, that's what tagging's all about eh?

ARTICLES (these will be there at launch, though they will evolve)

The Articles section is getting a total makeover to a *much* better, cleaner system. It will also be a *lot* easier for members to compose their own articles without fighting with the post editor and pagination mechanics quite so much.

WORKSHEETS and SUBMISSIONS System. (the *system* will be there but the content will grow)

The worksheets system has been totally and completely redesigned and will be much more intuitive than our original system. We'll have a great tool for submitting info for "Yes, It's IKEA" Articles and other features for folks that don't want to write everything themselves. The worksheets are something we're really excited about, and have *BIG* plans for. The basic system should be functional when we go live, but there will probably not be a lot of actual forms built in it yet, that will be an ongoing process.

IKEA Journal (this will be there but probably a bit sparse)

We're going to have an IKEAFANS site journal/Blog that folks can contribute to. It will be a kind of group thing all about IKEA in general; what's happening, what's coming out that's new, what sales stops there are that sort of thing. Have to be careful as we don't want to step on IKEAHacker's toes at all we're big fans/supporters of Jules, but there a lot of IKEA related info that we'd like to keep folks up to date on, it's a totally different focus than she has.

BEST For LAST!

GALLERY GLORY!!! (This will probably *not* be fully implemented before launch barring a major stroke of luck)

Can't give you exact details yet, but I'm working with a friend on a way to more usefully integrate the Gallery into the forums. What we're picturing is a tagging system (kinda like facebook) where you can select a section of an image and add a tag about it. Every image that has a tag added to it will generate a thread in the Gallery Discussion forum (which will show up in the forum recent threads/searches) which will be displayed in what's called a "threaded" view. What that means is that all replies to a given post will be grouped under the post they respond to in a tree like structure. So each image that has tags on it will have a post for each tag added, and any discussion about that tag will be shown listed *under* and indented from that tag. We're hoping that this will breath real life and interest into discussions about images rather than having image comments buried in the galleries comment system.

Imagine someone posts a picture of a Georgious kitchen ( I know... It's a stretch, but it could happen )and you just HAVE to know how they did something clever in their breakfast bar setup. Instead of having to try and describe it, you can just tag that section of the image and ASK! The OP of the image will get an email and can simply respond and answer right there in the discussion thread that will be forever associated with the image. What a fantastic way to add more value to the images!

And even better, I'm hoping to build this system as the basis for the Flatpack FAQ concept that I've been working on for *months* now... The idea is that we'll have each page of the instructions as a separate image in an image set, and so people will be able to tag a specific step of the instructions, or section of the illustration and add comments, warnings, explanatory photos/videos etc! So we could, as a community, effectively build *BETTER* instructions! Hold contests for the best Flatpack FAQ of the month!