GMTech Magazine

2009 has already began and the improvements on GMTech are following suit. A GM magazine releasing more than six issues, that was probably a shock to many people, however fourteen – that was something special. But we aren’t done yet, after over two years of making this magazine we have began to understand the wants and needs of you our readers and as always we launch this year with changes to the magazine in order to successful survive another year of this hard business.

GMTech Forum

The new forum look is upon us, we regularly look around and try to update the look and feel of the forum by setting up new themes and by installing new modifications. Following on from the winter theme we had for the last month, we opted to go for a theme that looked a lot like Microsoft Office and after asking the opinions of many members it was 50/50 on those who loved it and those who hated it. Well we hope that after seeing and using it for a few days that you will begin to like it more and appreciate how well it goes with the GMTech website and look of the GMTech issues. If not, then I will happily look around for another theme that will work better and keep you coming back.

Along with the new look we have also installed several modifications to allow for an even better feel to the forum, many of which were trialled on the winter theme and a few of which have just be installed along with the new theme. In the post area you will see a drop down menu for the colour, font face and font size, this allows you to select from several options to increase the appearance of your messages. You can now also write in the ‘Reason for edit’ box, if you are making an edit to your post and can change the ‘Message Icon’ a lot easier thanks to the new way it is laid out. The Advanced Visual Verification system has been upgraded to one that works, the previous would have went unnoticed by many of you, however a few members of the team were having troubles actually making posts and sending Private Messages – now that isn’t good. URL Popup and Increase/Decrease Postbox Size were two modifications added to allow you to make links to other websites/blogs etc a lot easier and increase the size of the postbox saving you from having to scroll down. Finally the latest modification that has been added is titled ‘OnOffAvatar’, quite simply it puts a green box around the posters avatar if they are online, and if they are offline it will display a gray ring. This way you can clearly see who is online and who is offline, not really needed – but it does add some colour to an otherwise ‘blue’ theme

Those are the changes to the forum and there are more to come over the next few months. We plan to change the website theme, however we are still struggling to find one that will top the current one.

This also marks the first of the GMTech’s weekly updates, so that is all until next week (or less if something really good happens).