So it's happening for real a week from yesterday, after the beta testers asked for and were granted one more week to continue beating up on the beta site.
You can check out the beta here: DailyKosBeta.com
Angie in WA wrote up a Visual step-by-step guide to DK4 - Part I. In her first installment, Angie focuses on the kickass new user profile page. In Part II, Angie looks at following and privacy.
Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse wrote up Markos & Meteor Blades Welcome New Users to DK 4 Groups -- Part 1 of a two-part look at the new Group functionality.
Dom9000 has an illustrated guide to many of the new features.
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In this final pre-transition update, I want to make a single point crystal clear: while the new site has all sorts of new bells and whistles, you don't have to use the site any differently than you do now.
Groups? We already have them -- groups like Black Kos, ekos, and myriad more. DK4 just makes it vastly easier for those groups to organize. If you don't care about running your own group, or helping run one, then don't worry about it! Nothing says you have participate in a DK4 group, just like nothing said you had to participate in a DK3 group.
Following? We already have that functionality -- it's called "subscribing" to someone. That was always stupid nomenclature, since subscribing in common usage means paying for something. But the bottom line was that the functionality existed. Look at the "subscribe" link next to anyone's user name on a diary. We just took what was an obscure, clunky feature, and gave it more prominent billing. And needing a new name, we borrowed from current social networking parlance and went with "follow". Some of you claim that you're too cool to "follow" anyone. I follow Karl Rove and Glenn Beck on Twitter. Doesn't mean I'm literally following them. Angie in WA likes to say, "Think of it as 'funneling' content into your stream" instead of stalking or fandom. But whether the term "follow" annoys your or not, fact is, it's not new functionality. It's just better implemented. And just like in DK3 no one forced you to subscribe to anyone or anything, same thing with DK4. You don't want to follow anyone? No one at DK4 gives a shit! Just like we didn't care in DK3.
Tags? In DK3, you had to add at least one tag to publish a diary. In DK4 ... you need to put in at least one tag to publish a diary. The only difference is that tags were all but useless in DK3, while they are awesome in DK4. Just look at this kick ass Egypt tag. You can spend days going through all that fantastic content, happily collated by DK4. But if you don't ever want to look at a tag page? No one cares! Just like on DK3.
So now that we determined that you don't have to use any of the new killer functionality to use Daily Kos, the question is, is there anything else you need to change to enjoy the new site? And the answer is, NO.
First, let's start with a comparison of the two front pages, on my 15" laptop at a resolution of 1440 x 900, opened as long as possible on my computer, to scale (click on image to see full-size):
You can see immediately that DK4 is wider, the fonts are bigger (and lighter, but they will darken), and there's more going on at the top. Some people hate that they have to scroll down more to read that first post. And to them, it means that there's "less" content at the top of the page.
However, that's not true. Let's start from the top -- In DK4 you have the Community Spotlight, which is a real-time, all-day-long diary rescue. We put that front and center on the site -- a sign of how important I consider you guys. Yeah, the top front-page diary gets pushed down on the page, but I did it to give the community top billing. Sorry, but I'm not apologizing for that. I'm actually quite excited about it.
Also look at the Feature box on the top of the right-hand column. We'll be using that to feature hot content, whether it's our latest polling numbers, the latest community live blog, a hot story, or a kickass diary. So just add it up: On DK3, top of the fold, you have two headlines (three, if the top story is REALLY short). Top of the fold on DK4, a lot of headlines.
And let's face it, when you come to Daily Kos, you scan headlines. Nothing will have changed in that department! Except that now you have more headlines to scan above the fold.
The vast majority of you scan headlines on the:
Front page
Recommended diaries box
Recent diaries box
If that's all you want to do on DK4, then you're in luck!
Right below the Feature box, you'll see a familiar sight, the Recommended Diaries box:
There's a minor difference -- on DK3, the Recommended box holds eight headlines. In DK4, we kicked it out to 12.
And below the Recommended Diaries box, is the DK4 equivalent of the Recent Diaries box -- the Recent Rec'd box:
A diary now requires a single recommend from a trusted user to get on the front page, weeding out diaries that are trollish, non-political (do my cycling updates really need to be on the front page? No!), frivolous, and non-substantive. The bar is low -- a diary has to have value to a single trusted user, out of the tens of thousands on the site, to make it to the Recently Rec'd list.
But if that's not good enough and you want a completely unfiltered stream of recent diaries? You're also in luck! Merely click on "Diaries" and get everything written by everyone, even sortable a bunch of different ways. I don't doubt that some people will decide to make that their Daily Kos home.
So bottom line -- if all the new features scare you or annoy you or anger you or fail to excite you, then no problem! The old Daily Kos is still there, at the core of all this new functionality.
You can ignore everything else to your heart's content.