Site Updates - Quick Searching, User Searching & More

Hi everyone,

Today I pushed up some updates to the site and decided to make a news post about it instead of posting in the site suggestion's topic.

The first new feature I want to talk about is the ability to quick search. This feature makes quickly traversing NLC a lot more intuitive. The feature can be found in the navigation menu as the magnifying glass icon. If you click it, a dropdown will appear that gives you the ability to quickly navigate between topics, comments, or users. These options and fields are pretty self explanatory, but there are a few shortcuts that I've added that are handy. The first one being that you can activate the quick search from anywhere by pressing the / button on your keyboard. The other shortcut is when you are searching a topic - a dropdown list of topics will appear as you search; if you click on a topic, it will automatically take you to the topic (instead of taking you to the search page like it would if you clicked the "Search" button). This is useful for when you know what topic you want to post or browse in. For example, if you want to post something in the 3D Modeling topic, instead of browsing through the list of topics on the first page, or clicking through to the search, you can simply press /, type in "3d", select the topic (you can also navigate the dropdown list with arrow keys and select with enter), and it will instantly take you to the topic's most recent comment! This is the same for when you want to quickly search for a user, but it will take you to their profile. As I said, you can also click the Search button and it will take you to the advanced search page with your parameters.

Another new feature is the ability to search users. Some people have asked me about this and I do think it's something NLC should have so I decided to add it along with the quick search feature. You can now search users by username or when they signed in, this makes it easy to view their profiles without having to find some link to it.

Aside from that there are a few smaller features that I've added - one is the "Back To Forum" button that is now included on the desktop site at the top and bottom of a topic. I was also able to reduce asset sizes for NLC by almost 40% (any developers that use module systems with their projects - make sure you are only pulling in what you need to)! This has made the load times for the desktop and mobile versions of the site a bit (~15%) faster.

Until the next Really Meaningful & Cool update
~ ride