A New Look

Regular visitors to SBC Today will recognize an entirely new look to the site, the only change we’ve made to the appearance other than a Christmas color scheme and images in 2007. Clearly, it was time for a bit of a refresh. But we had to have some help.

That help came in the person of Cory Miller. Cory has been a friend to many of us in the Baptist blogosphere, and though I’ve never met him personally, he’s helped me out on several occasions. Cory is a fellow Oklahoman, and you can read more about him by clicking here. He has graciously provided this wonderful new theme for us. It’s called “Flexx,” and you can check it out by clicking here. Though we still have some tweaking to do, we’re excited about the new look and grateful to Cory for helping to bring about this needed change.

Speaking of change, it’s also coming to our commenting system. We’ve implemented a WordPress plugin called “Intense Debate,” and this adds some new functionality to our commenting system. I don’t have a complete handle on all of the added capabilities, but perhaps the most useful will be comment threading. This will take some getting used to, but I believe it will ultimately make our comments much more user-friendly. Essentially, what it means is that if you have a comment about the main post itself, you add it to the bottom of the thread as usual. But, if you want to respond directly to something someone else has said in a comment, you can click a “Post Reply” button in that comment, add your thoughts, and they will appear next to the comment to which you are responding. No longer do you have to introduce your reply by referring to a comment number; you can reply and your response will be threaded, appearing next to the comment to which you’ve responded. [UPDATE] It took less than twenty-four hours for me to tire of the complications added by the above-mentioned plugin. I suppose it does what it advertises, but it was just not workable for us. In its newest iteration, WordPress allows for threaded comments, but our new theme does not yet support this feature. So, in the meantime, I’ve found another plugin that gives us only the feature we wanted (comment threading), without all the extras that were just getting in the way. So the comments are now much as they were before, except that you can reply directly to someone’s comment by clicking on “reply” at the bottom of the comment. To reply to the post itself, simply add your comment at the bottom of the list. [/UPDATE]

We hope that these changes will be beneficial to all our readers and commenters, and that they will allow us to focus on debate and discussion of important topics as we seek together for God to be glorified through our lives, our churches, and our convention.