WordPress is basically a lightweight content management system. Behind the scenes, this will take my workload down from about 40 hours per month to about 4-6 hours per month. The most notable front-end improvement is the automatically populated home page, which displays the most recent items from a variety of categories.

Category/section pages: Anywhere you see a category name (like Fiction or Photography), you should be able to click it and see a list of everything that’s been posted in that section in reverse chronological order. WordPress and the amazing Linoluna theme do this automatically!

Issue archive pages: Same as the category pages, except this will group posts from each month together. You’ll be able to find these links in the right sidebar under “Issues.”

Author pages: This is one thing I’m really excited about! I’ve been wanting author profile pages since I launched the site in June 2008. Once they get updated, these pages will contain a photo, biography, email link, and a list of everything that author has published on the site.

RSS Feeds: You’ll find all of these soon on the RSS Feeds page.
-Main feed: This one is super easy — http://supraterranean.com/feed/
-Recent Comments
-Categories: Anything posted in a certain category. So if you just want to follow Poetry or Video posts, you can do that!
-Tags: Same as categories, but even more specific
-Authors: To get an author RSS feed, just add “feed/” to the end of the author page URL. Example: http://www.supraterranean.com/author/tpierson/feed/
In other words, any archive-style page on the site has an RSS feed. Just try adding “/feed” to the end of the URL.

Front page:
- Most recent posts from various categories show in main area, with featured items in a slideshow view at the top
- Sidebar has Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Most Viewed, Most Commented, Most Recommended, Most Emailed, Recently Tweeted, Most Tweeted (note: I still need to tweak some of these to get them working)
- Also, headlines from Refractor Blog, Issue archive links, and an Arts & Culture news box with headlines from Michigan Radio and NPR

Article pages:
- Recommend function replaces star ratings. This decision was partially inspired by JS-Kit.com‘s ill-conceived decision to drop everything but their comment service, which they’re renaming Echo. It’s totally out of my control, but ratings on the old site will become inactive in November 2009. But also, I didn’t like the idea of rating creative work. I want the site to be a constructive environment.
- Similar Posts: This function should grab similar posts by category, keywords (tags), and author, and display them at the bottom of articles when applicable.
- Disqus Comments: Disqus.com is an amazing comment service that is portable across the web. You’ll notice that many big sites use the service, like Mashable.com. I also put Disqus comments on the Michigan Radio website at work.
- Share button from AddThis. I used this on the old site too, since they provide dozens of social networking links for you to send pages to.

Email updates using Feedburner.com — you can subscribe here. They also provide a mobile page that can be viewed on any internet-enabled mobile device: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/supraterranean

- I’ll now use a rolling submission process, so there are no deadlines. Posting schedule changes from once a month to more like once a week. Each month will still be collected under issues archive.

Category names: Film changed to Video. Audio was added. Multimedia was removed, since now we can cross-categorize posts if needed.

- Message board has been removed because it was totally unused

- Admin Blog name was changed to the Refractor Blog. This refers to idea of a telescope that brings all sorts of faraway things into focus. Plus I’m an astronomy nerd.

- Your old links should still work if you published material on the old site. I’ll be linking to old archive pages so people can browse content from issues #1 to #14. I tried to keep the new site’s visual feel similar to the old site, while making the necessary updates.

I worked all last week and most of the weekend to customize the Linoluna theme for WordPress. Things have gone better than expected, so I plan on launching the new site tonight! Until then, here’s a shot of the front page to get you excited (click to enlarge). Thanks for your patience and support. I’ll provided a detailed explanation soon so you know about all the added features.

This is a sneak peek at the new article view (click the image to enlarge). As you can see, the title and text will appear much like they do on the current site. The banner image will now be 616×200 (actually probably more like 616×300) instead of the previous 450×250 (a little wider, but not quite as tall). You’ll also get to see where you are in relation to the home page — that’s right above the title.

One of my favorite things about the Linoluna theme is the info box on this article view. You’ll get to see the author, publish date, section (category), # of views, # of comments, link to print, and link to email. There will also be a share button to send the page to various social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. And I will have a Recommend function — probably a heart icon that you can click — which will generate a Top Rated list on the home page. This is a slightly different take on the current ratings methods. It will be easy to switch at the last minute, so let me know what you think about the single recommend versus five-star ratings.

Also, if you click the author’s name, it will take you to an author page with everything they’ve ever published and a biography! That means I’m going to have contributors make author accounts on the site as soon as I set it up at Supraterranean.com.

Stay tuned for more updates! I’m excited!

(p.s. – All this is subject to change, so don’t get mad if something does…)