Got some good news to report on bagus.org. I launched version 2.1 with a few amazing new features. I tackled adding one feature that I had really wanted to hit about April of '99, but couldn't quite figure out how to do it. I think I tried four times and gave up, but finally the way to do it just occurred to me before leaving SF and now with some time on my hands, I got around to doing it. It really does a lot to bring the power of the system out to the project managers and the end users.

Before, all the navigation had to run across the top of every page. Now I made it so it's totally modular and you can move it down to the left side like most sites do and even move it to the right side. There's now even two places at the top you could have it. So check out Sex Ed Mom's left nav on this page: http://www.bagus.org/sexedmom/index.jsp?x=More_Questions_and_Answers

Notice how the second level nav is embedded in the first. And it's on the left. Add that to the graphical nav systems I added for the last version and it's starting to look pretty good. We're hoping to really launch Sex Ed Mom's site very soon. On the main bagus.org area, I left the top nav at the top on the home page, but put it on the left on the lower level pages.

I'll put together a little more detail on how this works for those interested. It really makes playing with site design a breeze over any other method I've ever seen or used. I like it on top... no I like it on the left... no, top level on top, second level on the left, no, top level on the left, second level on the right. What ever. You can try all these changes at the touch of a button instead of recoding complex html on all your pages.

I also added a way to add a comment to individual navigation items so you can provide a link and an explanation to pages you create. No examples there yet...

Let's see, I also added ways to sort the articles and pages on the edit side. That's pretty helpful. You can sort articles now based on their title, their order of entry or where they are appearing on the site. 3 levels of sorting. Neat!

Well that's pretty much it, but in a way this getting the nav bars able to be moved seems to actually have made me think I'm almost done with the basic functionality of the application. Next, I want to make error pages for bad urls, finally make the text entry so that if you aren't putting in html, it will put in breaks and paragraph tags for you and make it so changing the name of a page also changes the links to it found in various text fields found on other pages. but that all seems minor compared to all the other work that's gone into this.

Boy, then we'll really be styling. I'll actually begin to think about the rewriting of the site (my one guy got scared away, I think) and getting more clients.