Welcome everyone to the framework for the new Artalyst site. What you see now is the "work-safe" skin which contains no fancy graphics or flashy colors. The new skins for the site will be available upon the release of _episode 01. When the story begins.

What is the story? The story is a fictitious chronicling of the Artalyst, the concept of the Artalyst and its members. The “episodes” are perpetual, and will be released on a set schedule. The story is organic, encompassing the activities of the site’s members and their artistic contributions while also maintaining a plot.

These are some of the site features that have already been installed, tested and perfected on the new site:

• Image Gallery:
  No art site is complete without a significant gallery engine with image upload assistance, thumbnail creation and custom thumbnail uploading.

• Member Leveling:
  Subscribing members will acquire points for posting certain content and general participation in the site, voting on images, etc. Members will level with these points and gain access to more of the story and other features.

• Advanced Image Scoring:
  Users will not just score images from 1 to 10 any longer. You will have the ability to grade an image in Creativity, Lighting, Execution, Composition, etc. six categories to rate an image total.

• User blogs (for members):
  You can set up and maintain your own personal (public or private) blogs on the site. Anyone can read and comment on your blogs, but only members can create blogs. Blogs offer a good way to post your musings for others to see while not having to maintain content that is considered “on-topic”.

• Groups:
  Groups allow any member to create their own exclusive area, any user can joing and post withing the group, but only members can create groups. Others can request invitation, or the group leaders can invite others. Within the group, content can be posted and updated visible to the group only, or publically. This can serve two purposes. One benefit will be private blogs. A second will be having an area to work on a project, allowing others to help, then unveiling the project to the public when it is complete.

• Site skins:
  In addition to the normal look and feel of the site, there will be an optional "work safe" skin mode that you can view the site in. The work safe skin will have no fancy graphics other than the gallery images (of course) and a black text on white background.

• Content Creators:
  We have a system that makes it easy to create content for the home page like IOTM and site news using a very robust graphical interface built into the site webpage for editing the content. This will help keep the front page alive and interesting.

• Multi-language interface:
  The "interface" of the site, not the actual content like forums and people's comments, is now configurable in you settings. The languages used are English, Danish, French, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Arabic (somewhat limited)

• Search:
  A very advance search tool that actually searches the text in the database allowing you to very precisely control filters.

• Notifications:
  Recieve notification by email, anything you want to be updated on. Be updated on comments, or when new topics or stories or artwork is posted, etc. Be updated when you receive comments on your images, etc.

• Forums:
  Newer nicer cleaner forums. In fact, the whole site is just cleaner, and A LOT less buggy.

• Multi-author environment:
  Allows several authors to create an article, story, book whatever. This was necessary for allowing the authors of the site to create the storyline of the Artalyst.

• Private Messaging:
  This feature has been cleaned up significantly. You may now also see if your message was read or not.

• Subscription Membership:
  This is set up now, but no payment plans are set, waiting for the content to be fully created.

• Help:
  The help function is, in most places, right where you need it, next to the feature.
  

New features that are currently in development by a group of software engineers:

• Advanced Image Statistics:
  Subscribing members will be able to view advanced statistics on their images including page views, views by type, breakdown of the image’s category scores, etc.

• Site titles:
  Members will be awarded titles when meeting certain criteria, ie. having a certain amount of images selected for the feature images area, leveling up to a certain level, posting a certain amount of comments, etc. In your account settings you can choose your title that will be displayed with your name.

• Member Portfolios:
  Subscribing members will receive their own portfolio that is customizable. You can choose which images are included and which are not. You will have a clean URL to your portfolio like username.artalyst.com.

• Comment Ranking:
  Users that comment on your images can be graded by you, indicating if the comment left by that user was useful to you or not. Commenters will then gain a ranking that helps others decide if they really know what they're talking about.

• Member Portfolios:
  Badges will be awarded in a similar fashion to receiving site titles and leveling up. These badges will show on your profile page or next to your name on the site.