Most of the improvements to the community infrastructure in 2012Q3 have been “under the hood”. For projects in particular we’ve done a lot of work to profile and improve performance – allowing us get better page load times even if running on less capable hosting hardware.

The visible changes are primarily small but important changes to the user interface. For example we’ve added breadcrumb to the top project discussion boards thread and forum lists to make it easy to navigate between threads and forums (as shown below)

We also made it more obvious how to set advanced filters on ticket queries, fixed some layout bugs and made the appearance of generated lists more attractive/consistent. We improved the project “following behaviour“, and added better documentation on how it works.

Lastly in Projects, we made significant updates to the home page and documentation; they both look a lot better, and the important information is much easier to find.

In the wiki, we’ve been putting a lot of effort into improving the Windows Phone portal. It now uses pseudo “live tiles” to make it obvious you’re in Windows Phone territory on the wiki, and has been well categorised to make it easy to find the information you might need. There are over 300 articles, many of which were contributed in this quarter.

There have been many other wiki updates, including the addition of an area for Indonesian content, and improvements to the organisation of content in Series 40 Java and Web app areas.

You can find more detail on all changes in the Community Help & Support project. If you have any other suggestions for improvement to any of the community infrastructure (wiki, projects, discussion boards, blogs) then please raise them there.

Hamish Willee (Community Manager)

PS: My special thanks to the Wiki and Project moderators for their ongoing (voluntary) support for the community on these services.