Well, we did it , with no nervous breakdowns, no rending of garments, no ululations of grief. We’re back, and without too many glitches. In fact, only two major glitches stand out, one obvious, the other, not so much.

The first thing you’re going to notice is the addition of some rather funny characters in many of the stories. This is a result of a database dump issue that didn’t translate some of the quotes, etc. into the appropriate HTML code, so the team here will have to go through the stories one by one over a LONG period of time to get them out.

Of course, if the users could help out by editing their own blogs and entries, that would be nice too….:-)

The second thing is that we switched a couple of user ID numbers around. This affects me and Ilan Bashir, as some of the articles listed under Ilan now show up as having been written by me, and vice versa. I will try and get around to attributing these correctly asap.

Now, onto the good stuff.

The first thing you’re going to notice is the new theme. This is based on the default ‘Garland’ theme that ships with Drupal 5.1. I liked it so much, I decided to keep if for now unless someone can present an overwhelming reason to sit and redesign. Of course, the theme has been customized for our site, with the ‘bluish’ color scheme being replaced by a more green-centric look and several of the elements changed from their original look.

The font sizes have been increased as well, and hopefully, that should help out a bit.

Next up: Image uploads! ProgressiveIslam.Org is now pleased to announce that each user has their own ‘space’ to upload images along with your posts. You do have a quota, about 20MB, so please watch that, but otherwise, you should be fine.The interface for image uploads is a bit better, and users can now reference old images with just a click.

Also new to the site is the editor used to add blog entries and stories; we’ve switched to a different editor with a more streamlined set of tools; hopefully, this should work out well for most users. Mac users: You’re going to have to use Firefox, ‘cause Safari isn’t gonna work.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be adding (and taking away) features and new content to and from the site. We hope this new upgrade and the other stuff we’re doing will pique your interest, and we hope you keep coming back for more. We will be adding contact forms for the site, as well as new RSS feeds that make it easier to see what’s going on on the site. A lot of material from our bloggers goes unnoticed because it’s not showcased on the front page; we intend to change that and more.

So, welcome back, have fun, and give us a shout if you need to.