BEFORE
Here's what the old toolbar looked like:

As you can see, there's no room for labels or per-item help. This meant that if you couldn't figure out what an icon meant you had to 'mouse-over' it to see a tooltip. To obtain help on a given topic you had to either click the yellow question mark at the end if the toolbar then navigate to the function in question, or open the report then find the yellow question mark inside that report to see it.

AFTER
And here's what we have now:

As you can see, items are now more clearly grouped by category (they were previously actually, but that grouping was a lot less obvious). In addition, words accompany each icon to describe the function, and where help is available for a given function, the icon for that help topic is right beside the item.

We don't like making big changes like this and try to do so very rarely (not least because all the screenshots in the help system itself and all the training manuals now have to be rewritten). In this case however, we think that once the shock has worn off, you'll quickly grow to love it.

Special thanks to James Fraser who was the first person to request, and then to develop a prototype of such a menu system about three years ago - that code never made it into the final build, but this one's dedicated to you, bud!

The editor panel we'd previously used to edit page and posting content in Ecclesiact was FCK Editor 2.5.b - and it began showing some serious problems when used with Internet Explorer 9, the most serious being an inability to place ECL, audio, video and YouTube tags in the intended location, and a tendency to make 'more' tags disappear without a trace.

Development of FCK Editor seems to have been abandoned now and the makers have started from scratch with a new product called CK Editor. Now that product is stable enough to use in production we've reprogrammed all of our special customized plugins (ECL, Audio, Video and YouTube tag handlers) and packaged it with the latest build.

One very welcome side-effect of the new upgrade (as we have it configured) is that this new editor makes a much better job of formatting HTML content to show 'nesting' of HTML tags. This means that those of you who edit your own page layouts will have a much easier time when working in design mode. Another nice touch is the use of 'floating panel' dialogs for editing tag properties - much less likely to be blocked by over-zealous 'popup blockers'. There's a new 'spell-check as you type' system included, and you should also experience much faster loading with the system from now on.

Although we've gone to great effort to minimise the visual changes you'll encounter using the new editor we have taken this opportunity to apply some much-needed standardization for the toolbar icon postions so that you should have a more consistent experience when working with the various screens in the system.

Please let us have your feedback about this new feature.

Colours can be set in the control panel for the Breadcrumbs component to Turin fancy styling on or off and to set colours for the shaded areas, 'home' icon and text both normally and when the mouse is positioned over the control.

If you have automatic text resizing enabled for you site, this newly enhanced control works with that too. Here's how the control renders normally along with a couple of examples showing 'enhanced' mode:

For a discussion on this see this posting at the God-bit discussion forum.