JungleJar Got A New Pair Of Shoes.

• Published by: Christopher Hennis
• November 24, 2008

So, we’re almost there it looks like. JungleJar has been redesigned, and all that’s left now are tweaks and small changes. The development part is about 99.999% done, while I’d say the design part is about 95% done.

The posts page now displays related posts and has links to make it a bit more easy for our users to bookmark our content. The search has been re-indexed which means all of our content will absolutely be crawled via a search. This is nothing really big at all, but something that I had been meaning to do. The category listings have changed aesthetically and look so much better in my opinion. We’ve swapped our old layout for a more content-oriented 4-column layout. We’ve made sure the website is composed of validated XHTML 1.0 using a strict document-type definition. Our CSS is also validated as CSS Level 2.1, and we’ll be crawling every single post we’ve ever made here on JungleJar to ensure our “on-the-fly” XHTML is validated also.

All wasn’t a bouquet of roses, unfortunately. Awhile back, when JungleJar was really in its infancy, I hacked up the permalink structure to display category listings with no base. So, if I were viewing the articles category listing or a post in that category, you would see JungleJar.com/articles/. There was nothing like there is now, where we use JungleJar.com/category/articles/; /category being our category base. Anyway, so no matter what trickery I tried using, our category pages with the hacked up permalink just would not allow anyone to view anything but it’s very first page. Paged navigation just was not happening. So, what does this mean? Well, it means I had to change up the permalink structure to include a base, and every single URL here on JungleJar has changed. Something every webmaster would rather avoid. Regardless, it’s done now, and it’s something I won’t have to worry about later. I’m a bit sore about it all, but I’ll live. For now, if you have any posts and/or pages here at JungleJar bookmarked, please update them to reflect the changes in the permalinks.

Well, rather than write a novel here detailing every single change here on JungleJar, I encourage you all to just kind of have a look around for yourself. We’re also working on bringing out 3 new and free Wordpress templates within the next few weeks. One should be available this week.

I hope you all enjoy my labor of love and appreciate the new design! I’d love to hear what you think about it, so shoot me an email by using our contact page.

If you’d like to take a look at the “process-page” I created when I first started the re-design, showing a small gallery of screenshots I took during the evolution, you can do so by clicking here.