New Chat and Other Features

Yesterday, we rolled out a new Chat system. If you're logged in, you will see a chat bar at the bottom of your screen. You might press Ctrl-F5 for a hard refresh if you happened to visit while I was installing it (your browser may be caching an older version of the chat bar).

I have received great feedback and suggestions from people through chat who otherwise may not have felt comfortable emailing or too bashful to post. I noticed in the system statistics' "Total Messages Sent in Last 24 Hours", that a number of you have been using it (178 343 messages sent). Let me know of any issues or concerns.

I've also acted on a few special requests. Someone asked for a "Tips for Module Creation" subforum beneath the e-Sword Tools and Utilities forum. This forum is for tips, tools, and helpful hints loosely related to e-Sword module creation. I think this subforum will eventually contain very useful material. I've been surprised at the small "oddball" apps and utilities people loosely use in conjunction with e-Sword and/or e-Sword module creation.

Finally, a "geeky" suggestion was the addition of a user editable progress bar. This way, module creators (or anyone with a project) can update the status of their project to include a percent complete. An example of the progress bar is shown here. This feature is available from the Special BBcode icon in the text editor. No one is under any obligation to use this feature, or use the Modules In Progress forum at all. It's just a "nice to have" feature.