Hey everyone, I hope you like the new look of the place. I tried to keep it as close to home as possible while bringing you some new features. There are a ton but I'd like to talk about a few.



I've always wanted to give the community more ways to showcase themselves and their art, so the features I'll be working on fine tuning first will be the ones that spotlight each member in their own way. I want you to be able to show off your MP profile and utilize it to represent yourselves in your daily businesses. Not all of us can run our own websites or afford to hire someone to do it for us, so the more show off tools we have as a community, the better for each individual. That's the idea anyway.



One of the coolest features is our new articles highlighting feature. If you see a post that strikes you as article material and think it should be promoted to our front page, let us know! As the article section grows over time it will be a great way for us to promote ourselves to the public and put a spotlight on those who turn our heads.



Your profiles are being beefed up to show you off in your own corner of our community. You now have built in galleries! Upload pics of your art and promote yourselves to your hearts content. The profiles page changes will be ongoing, so keep an eye out for upcoming polls to vote and make suggestions on profile content.



The "featured members banners" now shows on every forum page instead of only the front. This means big things for those of you who get a spot in that box! Keep your eye out for the thread coming up with more info on that.



The facebook platform has been integrated so you have the requested "like" buttons as well as facebook login capability, import profile options, and more. If you use facebook then I'm boring you by now, so onto other cool stuff.



I know there's a lot to keep up with here sometimes and hearing you missed something funny or a killer deal is never fun, no one likes to be left behind! There's now an "Activity Stream" to help you keep up with everything going on here. We have "New posts", "New Group Messages", "New Articles" and so on instead of only new posts. "Today's Posts" which will give you posts form the last 24 hours is still under the forum quick links.



As always, there is more content for those users who have logged in, but now there is an extra perk to being a member! Once you log in most of the banner ads will disappear from your page. Woot! More options on this will be discussed and implemented in the near future, too.



The group options have improved, as well as the event options, and when the two are used together you have quite a powerful tool for promoting or learning about industry specific happenings! So get to organizing your events, and sending out invites.



A new mobile theme has been implemented. Forumrunner will be activated shortly as well for those of you on iphones/ipads and such.



There's more like a stretchy interface, and auto save features, but I doubt anyone is reading something this long when there are all these new things to click. If you see anything weird when you're clicking, please let me know. I was the only one to test so there might be things that are visually off like black text where white should be or something misaligned. I clicked and clicked and tried to find them all but I doubt I did.



I hope you like all the new changes and that they help you promote yourselves more easily and efficiently.