One of the many reasons we did a revamp of the site is to clean up a lot of things from the old site that were giving us problems and to add new features the old system could not provide.

We are now running a Drupal-based site, and we think this gives us some pretty nice flexibility and extensibility we did not have before.

With the new system, come changes.

You’ll notice that we now have a user registration system on this site. Let me make one thing clear: None of the site’s content (essays, news stories, polls, etc) is going to be locked away. Unregistered users will still be able to read stories, they will still be able to vote on polls and comment on articles.

What has changed is the level of interactivity unregistered users will have with the system. If you want to post a comment anonymously, that’s fine, but it’ll be placed in a moderation queue until an administrator can get to it. This is not an effort to censor anyone, but to cut down on spam, which was starting to be a problem on the previous site. In time, we will get a ‘captcha‘ module on the site that might reduce/remove the incidents of spam, but until then, well, sorry about that. Registered users can post comments without moderation.

Registered users also get a couple of other perks. One is a user blog system. If you register with the username “amirkhan”, your blog will be located at http://progressiveislam.org/blog/amirkhan. If you use a space between your first and last name (which you can do), then your blog will be located at http://progressiveislam.org/blog/amir_khan.

This is a fairly basic blog and does not seek to take the place of full-featured packages like Wordpress or Movable Type, but it’s just a little thing we’re doing for our users – and it’s free.

For the techies: The BlogAPI module for Drupal is on and set to MovableType, so you can blog using ecto, Marsedit or any other XMLRPC client, including from within Flickr, but you can’t post stories from ecto, only blog entries…

Also, we have RSS feeds galore for everyone. Feeds for the Essays and News sections are available, as are they for individual blogs, the entire user blog community and more. Have at it.

New features will be continually added. We are looking at options for easier image upload, but please, take it easy on us – no billboard-sized graphics on our servers. Also, be polite – no obscene stuff; while I haven’t put any filters into place, we do expect you to police yourself.

Well, that’s it for now. Please, feel free to give things a whirl…