Welcome to HWL 2.0 Beta

Thanks for your patience, I hope you enjoy this... So what's with this Beta?

Basically HWL 2.0 is new from the ground up and there is so much that is new that I really need to get a flow of members into it to truly test it out and make adjustments as I observe how the community makes use of this new platform.  I hope to tweak, polish and fine-tune the site fairly quickly so that we can leave the beta testing phase and I can focus on the next updates which will bring some new functionality, some of which may have been present in some form on the old site but couldn't make the cut here for the first release of this new platform.

So what's new, where do we start?

There are 2 important things you must do for a smooth transition to HWL 2.0:

1. The first thing you need to do is RESET YOUR PASSWORD. This is nessevary due to the vast changes and completley different engine that HWL runs on.

2. Second you should update your profile, update any fields not already filled in and be sure to edit your location data as it needs to be updated for the new format of HWL 2.0. If you had location data entered in the old HWL, it will show up in the CITY field here on HWL 2.0, please edit this to the three seperate fields that HWL 2.0 uses.  For example, if you had your location as: Los Angeles, California USA on the old site, it will now be showing that as Los Angeles, California USA in the CITY field.  Please update it so that each field contains the right data. City: Los Angeles, State: California, Country: USA.

Here is a quick list of the major new features:

• Rebuilt/redesigned - from the ground up everything has been re-thought, polished & simplified.  Clean, organized, simple and intuitive.

• Integrated Forums - forums are no longer a separate entity, one profile, one login, activity feed and profile linked. Still Tapatalk compatible. One big happy family at last, I hope ;)

• Improved Privacy - Fine grain privacy controls on every post, profile data.  Member blocking.

• Vastly improved photo/video galleries - view count, sliding view (no page reloads, keyboard shortcuts), photo rotation/tagging, video tagging. Hover to preview album content, easy ways to discover content, featured albums, videos. Drag and drop HTML5 based multi-uploader for super easy uploads, privacy controls & more!

• Enhanced & Mobile friendly video - upload a video of any file type and the system will process/encode your video automatically so it can be viewed via mobile devices, this is huge!

• Advanced search - perform searches based on multiple fields. Proximity (coming soon).

• Improved groups - cleaner format, featured groups.

• Improved member listings - online indicators, featured members, improved performance.

• Enhanced activity feed - unibox for easy posting of any content type, prioritized viewing (important activities are shown bigger than simple ones), privacy selector.

• Improved profiles - notification toolbar/icons, custom profiles with apps and different layouts via drag n drop.

• Improved Events – Featured events, recurring events, easy rsvp, location based event searching.

• Scalable – built to grow and handle a lot more members and traffic.

Where is the mobile app!?

While donations started out strong, they tapered off with lots of promise from many to contribute to the cause but never getting around to it.  So I have had to delay this feature as it is quite costly. The good news is that Apple's iOS 6.0 is out and adds support for uploading photos/videos to websites now! So this will help to tie us over until the mobile app can become a reality.