The following changes are all on the Voice test site, and will benefit from site admins trying them out before I put them anywhere near the live site. Some of the changes are pretty big and will probably have bugs.

I will talk through the changes at the next Voice Use Group Zoom meeting, 3rd February, midday. Details on the Voice Users website. The changes certainly won't go live before then!

First a headsup - I have just copied all the sites and user accounts from the live site onto the test site. (while I was typing this, in fact)

And so, on to the good stuff!

Admin Redesign

The biggest and most obvious change is that all website admin pages have been heavily redesigned, primarily with the goal of making them work better on mobile devices and tablets.

The general structure of the admin pages remains the same - you should be able to find the pages you want without looking too hard.

The hardest part was replacing the popups (e.g., to pick assets in the wysiwyg editor) with modal iframes. Especially where popups could open popups of their own! So it's possible there could be bugs or improvements to be made with this.

I am sure there will be problems lurking somewhere with this, since every admin page has changed. I am bound to have missed something. So please do check with your own sites that things are working for you - especially if you have an iPad or other tablet that you want to edit on, and report all bugs and suggestions for improvements.

CSRF Protection

What's that you say?

Cross Site Request Forgery Protection!

What?

Well... not content with changing every admin page on the whole system, I have also changed every form on the whole system, admin or otherwise, to make them secure against a form of attack called, you guessed it, Cross Site Request Forgery.

Basically, all forms now have a hidden secret token inside them, which is different for each user session, and is checked when the form is submitted. This means that forms can't be crafted in advance to do unexpected things on the system.

So, again, please do check that forms that are important to you are working as you expect on the test site. I have checked lots but, since there are many hundreds of them on Voice, I obviously haven't tested them all!

Printing

When you print a page, it's now less hideously broken. General page furniture such as navbars, footer, etc will be removed, but the main page content should display nicely.

Testing by using "print preview" of important pages would be useful!

(Does anyone actually print web pages!??)

A couple of smaller changes

• Weblog/Noticeboard use Screen Name instead of your real name, if set.
• Download an archive of this folder feature removed from Our Files.

Testing and Reporting

Probably the best thing to do is to report bugs and suggestions to admin@e-voice.org.uk, rather than posting them on here.

So, err, good luck!

Joe