Welcome to the new Twins Daily!

You’ll find the three core components of the site: Articles, Forums, and Blogs are still much like the old site. On top of that, we now have a Gallery Section where you can upload images to use in your blogs, forum posts, or just as a place to collect your favorite cat pics. Another all-new section is coming in the next week after it clears testing.

As always, you can open and create a personal blog to share with the rest of the community. One of my biggest issues with the last design and software package is that I never had time to shore up some of the deficiencies of the section and it always felt lacking in implementation. This time around, I spent several days combing through the blog section of the code, redesigning elements, and I hope you can see the difference. It’s easier to navigate and has a much cleaner design.

The coolest feature on the site – in my humble opinion, of course – is the kick-ass job Jeremy Nygaard has done with the Organization Charts and Roster & Payroll sections of the site. Instead of looking at a spreadsheet full of names, you can now sort and filter players before clicking into a more robust player section with more information and an image. Shout-out to Jeremy for working with me for weeks on this section of the site. We still have a little de-bugging to do and he hasn’t quite completed entering all the information for the minor league players but we’re off to a solid start.

As you poke around the site, you’ll notice several small changes:

- The search function is now by site section

- There is a handy “back” button at the top left of the site that takes you one level up the navigation

- If you mouse over a thread, you are given the option to preview the first and last post of that thread by clicking the down arrow

- If you are logged in and mouse over a person’s name, it will bring up a hover card to interact with that user

- Near the top right, you’ll see an icon that looks a bit like a guitar pick, use this to quickly navigate around the site

Despite spending what is well over 200 hours on this project over the past 8+ weeks, I still find features I didn’t know the software included by default. And this is just the beginning… In the coming months, we’ll continue to use this platform as a base to greatly expand the Twins Daily and MinnCentric communities, integrating them in ways that simply were not possible on the old platform.

That’s all I gots for today. Before I go, I’d like to thank the following people for putting in massive amounts of effort to help us make this site a success:

Jeremy Nygaard, ChiTownTwinsFan, diehardtwinsfan, twinsnorth49, ashburyjohn, glunn, USAFchief, and many more who helped me test the site during its early stages… Sorry if I forgot any of you that helped.

On behalf of John, Seth, Nick, Parker, and myself, I hope you all enjoy the new site and if you see any bugs in the system, feel free to comment below and we’ll start squashing them as fast as we can.