Ladies and gentlemen, we have progress.

As previously acknowledged on this blog, and discussed at length elsewhere, an unacceptable number of flaws remain in our blog software – for readers, commenters and bloggers themselves. So, to help us turn Nature Network into the blogging platform you all deserve, we recently hired an expert in Movable Type 4, the software that underlies our platform. He’s now deployed the first round of fixes to our test server. We thought we’d share a few screen grabs with you, to show that we have made substantial and quick progress from where we were just a week ago.

Note: Ian’s Meandering Scholar blog was chosen purely at random for these mock-ups.

Custom banners

Currently, every Nature Network blog looks pretty much the same, topped and tailed with the standard red livery. Come the new release, you’ll have full access rights to upload any banner image you like to spruce up the top of your pages and give your blog its own distinctive look. Matt and Lou will provide full instructions on how to do this and will be happy to assist with selecting, resizing or adding the banner.

Comment Editor

Some people have experienced problems with adding images and formatting in the comments section. With the new release, not only will you be able to add these elements with either HTML or Textile markup, you’ll also be presented with a handy box of icons like this:

All you need to do then is highlight the text and click the appropriate icon. The box can be hidden if you’d rather stick to typing.

Blog rolls

Some bloggers like to maintain a visible list of their favourite blogs and other web sites, a feature commonly referred to as a blog roll. With the new release, this will become possible on Nature Network.

When can you expect these changes?

The next scheduled release is in about two weeks, which gives us time to add still more improvements (such as speeding up load times) and thoroughly testing all these changes. It may be that the custom headers take slightly longer to implement on the live site as they have other dependencies, but we’ll keep you updated with exact dates as soon as we know them. If there are any small delays with the headers, they won’t delay getting the other features to you.

Then what?

This is just a starting point. We are utterly committed to turning things around and setting up all the features you’ve asked for that we can reasonably support. The next thing we’ll move on to is better stats reporting, so bloggers have a clearer idea of their traffic. We’ve already identified a module for Movable Type that will help with this, and we hope to have it running on our test servers soon. We’ll also look at the various options for lowering the barrier to commenting. We hear loud and clear that this is a priority for many of you, and so we’ll make it a priority to investigate a range of potential solutions. We have also identified a possible solution that may resolve the issue with needing to login to each individual blog to comment – more updates on these features next week. Finally, ongoing bugs that are affecting individuals are also being investigated – you will receive personal email updates as we make progress on the particular issue you reported.