Woo! If you've visited the site today you may have noticed a few changes. After about a month of working on new changes to the website behind the scenes we finally launched the new updates today, which involved switching to a new, dedicated server.
The most noticeable change you'll be able to feel is a significant speed boost to the entire site. Eli Dragen, our amazingly talented web developer did a complete overhaul of the back-end code and got everything optimized so pages load faster and quick-search is faster.
We also:
-Switched over from Facebook comments to Disqus.
-Improved and expanded the related content so it's even more relevant
-Switched to CKEditor instead of TinyMCE for the Add New Content forms for expanded functionality and more accurate copy/pasting.
-The Store page is gone
- Line spacing and font size is slightly bigger on articles for easier readability
-Added "Add New Content" links to more places on the site so it's more obvious members can submit content
- Fixed a couple bugs with the add new content pages
-Added new share buttons
-Updated the rating system so content only needs one vote by any member to recess or bump content (we may need to raise the minimum vote threshold back up to 3 before content is filtered if this change doesn't work well but for now everyone has the same editorial abilities as we do)
-Added featured films back to subject and category pages
-Added a Subscribe to Newsletter feature so non-members can receive our weekly email
-Added a preview of local blog content from our city chapters to the international homepage
-Added a preview of our Wall of Films to the bottom of the homepage
-A whole bunch of other smaller changes and improvements
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Also feel free to suggest any new features or changes you'd like.
We're Just Getting Started: A Preview of 2013
We're really excited about the coming year. Films For Action has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last few months, and we have a lot more planned to continue the momentum. 
A few milestones we reached as of January 2013:
Over 300,000 visits to the website per month (180k+ unique visitors)
34,000 Facebook fans
3,800 website members
17 city chapters in development
We have a lot of exciting plans in the pipeline. A few things we have planned:
- Forums for international discussion as well as a dedicated forum for each of our city chapters
- Multilingual support. By the summer we hope to have launched the Films For Action website in 20 languages, with content dedicated to news and videos in those languages and directly relevant to the countries where the language is spoken
- Documentaries and short films hosted by our own Films For Action video player
- More features for city chapter development
- More social networking features to spur the development of a niche alternative to Facebook that's dedicated to social change and film
- Features suggested by you
If you have any ideas for how we can grow the vision and functionality of the website, let us know.
Cheers!