I finished the scheduled upgrades to Oasis Magazine this afternoon, and I thought I'd point out some of the new features.

Firstly, you guys will notice our swanky new theme, which was primarily based on the new Drupal base theme. I have also (started) re-working the navigation of the site, to make things more cleanly linked, and simpler to navigate.

The next important change we made, is that you can no longer view user profiles without being logged in. This is an important security consideration, as it stops google and other search engines from crawling your user profile pages for details such as your AIM account, or myspace pages.

(more after the jump)

Furthermore, some of you might notice that the poll block (and indeed the whole left column) is missing. This is because you can now post polls in your own journal. This functionality will be extended in the future, so that every week a new poll will make it to the front page.

This was an initial upgrade of the software Oasis Magazine was running, and the goal was to get as close to the running site as possible, without adding any new features that could introduce new bugs during this process.

Now that the first step has been made, we will be introducing many exciting new features at a regular interval, since we are now able to work more closely with the Drupal community on features for this site. This was impossible due to how old the version of the software was previously.

If you guys have any questions, or find any bugs, please post them in the support forum, so that we can iron out the kinks and clear the road for making oasis even more kick ass.