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New website look

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New website look

Postby LyokoMan95 » Tue Apr 23, 2013 9:34 am

I really like it, even if it is a placeholder page. Will the look be integrated with the forums
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Re: New website look

Postby Cassius335 » Wed Apr 24, 2013 4:18 pm

Is there anyway to change the background colour to the same (or similar) light blue as the actual posts? I've increasingly found white backgrounds rather sparse & empty.

EDIT: And no sooner do I post something than the posts now look sort of very light blue-grey? Eh?

EDIT2: Ok, having checked another thread, light blue seems to be new posts. Um, ok.
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Re: New website look

Postby TheAppleFreak » Wed Apr 24, 2013 5:34 pm

Cassius335 wrote:Is there anyway to change the background colour to the same (or similar) light blue as the actual posts? I've increasingly found white backgrounds rather sparse & empty.

EDIT: And no sooner do I post something than the posts now look sort of very light blue-grey? Eh?

EDIT2: Ok, having checked another thread, light blue seems to be new posts. Um, ok.

I'll take a look through the source and see if I can make a modification to the theme source so all posts are a light blue (new are a darker shade). I have lots of edits to make on this as of yet, so just give me some time and it should all be taken care of.
I really gotta fix up this theme
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Re: New website look

Postby Carth » Wed Apr 24, 2013 6:50 pm

I just noticed - are all the Lyoko Warrior shillouettes up top supposed to be individual links? If so, will they all link to different things eventually? 8D
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Re: New website look

Postby TheAppleFreak » Wed Apr 24, 2013 8:12 pm

Carth wrote:I just noticed - are all the Lyoko Warrior shillouettes up top supposed to be individual links? If so, will they all link to different things eventually? 8D

It never actually crossed my mind; the silhouettes on the top of the forum skin are baked into the banner image. It's not difficult at all to make them links, though; thanks for the idea!

Now that I think about it, it would make responsiveness a lot easier to cope with...
I really gotta fix up this theme
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Re: New website look

Postby Carth » Wed Apr 24, 2013 11:44 pm

TheAppleFreak wrote:
Carth wrote:I just noticed - are all the Lyoko Warrior shillouettes up top supposed to be individual links? If so, will they all link to different things eventually? 8D

It never actually crossed my mind; the silhouettes on the top of the forum skin are baked into the banner image. It's not difficult at all to make them links, though; thanks for the idea!

Now that I think about it, it would make responsiveness a lot easier to cope with...


Yessss! I was helpful! :D
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Re: New website look

Postby Stonecreek » Thu Apr 25, 2013 12:53 am

The main thing I dislike about the new look is very minor. The text appears less centered on the screen now because the layout gives more room for bigger avatars and such by the username. So, in my screen, it's like I start reading farther over to the right than I am used to. I'll just have to adjust, because otherwise the skin rocks.
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Re: New website look

Postby green » Thu Apr 25, 2013 1:13 am

Sorry for being MIA for a while (which I see continuing for a little longer sorry) but I just wanted to slide in and compliment the new layout!
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Re: New website look

Postby TheAppleFreak » Thu Apr 25, 2013 1:43 am

Stonecreek wrote:The main thing I dislike about the new look is very minor. The text appears less centered on the screen now because the layout gives more room for bigger avatars and such by the username. So, in my screen, it's like I start reading farther over to the right than I am used to. I'll just have to adjust, because otherwise the skin rocks.

Don't worry, it's bugging me too. There's a bit of stuff that right now is just plain broken, and there are other bits and pieces of broken usability within this. I'm going to take a crack at the page HTML tomorrow, and reposition a bunch of the things that are bothering me.

Also, thank you for criticizing the design. Without criticism, I can't really make it better, and right now I really feel like it needs to be better. hint hint please criticize my design i need criticism
I really gotta fix up this theme
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Theme suggestions

Postby TheLQ » Thu Apr 25, 2013 6:44 am

First I have to say: Beautiful work. You have really put in a lot of effort and have made something really nice for the community

My own recommendations for the forum:
  • The user info column (where the avatar is) seems to be awkwardly large for a fluid auto-expanding layout like this. I tried messing around with the CSS, but its been a really long time since I've messed with floats and all the weirdness and cross-browser compatibility issues. With some tweaking 15em (preferable since it doesn't expand to a huge size on larger monitors, but hard to get working with all the floating) or 18%/80% (Can play with the percentages, but at least this works with little changes) on .postprofile.left/.postbody.left seems to work best
  • The logo for the forum is awesome, but IMHO eats up lots of screen real estate. On my laptop once you go past the nav bar, the logo, the phpbb header, and the page header, the forums don't start till the last 20% of the screen. You could help this by
    • Remove some of the random padding that's up at the top. The breadcrum div has a large bottom margin, then there's a blank line with 'clear:both' which doesn't do anything since there's no floats, then there's a hidden div that says to read the rules but might still be taking up space, and then there's a 'row-fluid' div inside of a 'topic-actions' div that has a huge top and bottom margin. Once you remove all that you've gained a decent amount of space at the top
    • A more complicated approach would be to integrate phpbb's headers into the top logo. It would be up to you on how to design it, but the end result would look great since it shows the theme is fully integrated into the fourm instead of just added on the top

For the main site
  • The buttons in the nav bar don't have href's but are still links, meaning that when I try to open one in a new tab it just loads the same page. Adding href's makes them actually act like links and has the added benefit of a basic failsafe if the menu isn't working
  • Positioning of the items in the nav bar seems to be determined by whatever the current container is. If you don't know what I'm talking about, compare the forum here to the main site. This is contrast to most similar top level bars where the position of things always stays constant, like anything google makes.
  • Any reason for the 60px padding in the footer (theme.css, line 292)?
  • Clicking on "Old Updates" causes rssSidebar to jump on top of the nav links and won't let you click on "Site Updates"
  • Its really neat how you load news from wordpress. Have you considered moving the old news to wordpress as well? IIRC you can fake publish times and maybe author names. It would simplify your code and could probably fix the above issue
  • There's a massive blank area after the news and I can't figure out why its there. There's no elements, all the news tabs are display: none, and rssSidebar doesn't seem to be misbehaving. Only thing that looks odd is the "$('#myTab a:last').tab('show');" line that doesn't wait for document ready. Maybe that's basing some changes on the page before CSS is loaded?
  • rssSidebar flash rapidly as you scroll near the bottom of the page. My guess is some code is trying to hide the bar while another is trying to show it. About all you can do is add in some logging statements and try to backtrack
  • Keep up the good work :-)

Its been a while since I've done web development, but if you need some help just let me know. I'll be poking around the site more over the next week or so and seeing if I have any other suggestions

FYI, my setup:
Screens: 1366x768 13" laptop and a 1440x900 17" monitor
Browser: Firefox Aurora 22.0a2
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Re: New website look

Postby TheAppleFreak » Sun Apr 28, 2013 12:53 am

First off, everyone, thanks for all of the compliments and the feedback on the design! I have a little bit of time today, so I'll work on fixing some of the gripes with the site that you're seeing.

TheLQ wrote:wall of text


I merged this with the existing thread for the new site/theme discussion. Okay, to address everything point by point:
Forums
  • Yeah, that's something that I intend to fix later today. It was a holdover from the theme this is based off of, which unfortunately didn't use space all too well. I'm working to make the site's visual footprint smaller, and that's one of the first things to be changed. I'm probably going to go with an 18%/80% split, or in Bootstrap terms, most likely a span2/span10.
  • I see what you mean. It doesn't help that I noticed a bit of duplicity in the information (notice on the main board index there are two copies of the "last time visited/current time"), and I guess that I have a skewed perspective on the visual footprint since both my laptop and desktop have 1080p screens. I'll see what's eating up the most space and scale it down/remove it. I really like the idea of integrating the other information into the header, too; I'll look into some ways how to implement it. The navbar itself might be a good place to store some of this; the original Bootstrap skin from which this theme is derived had that sort of implemented, but I really did not like their implementation. It might be a good idea to figure out how to implement it in LyokoBoot's design.


Main site:
  • That's odd strange. I haven't tested the site extensively in Firefox, but in Chrome I'm able to open those links in new tabs. I'll definitely implement that, though; I hadn't thought of a failsafe approach.
  • It's something that's bugged me as well, but as of right now I don't think that it's a super high priority item on my list. I've narrowed it down to a flaw in the responsive CSS that the main site uses; for some reason, its maximum width is stuck at 972px wide, while LyokoBoot and just about every other Bootstrap site out there has a max width of 1172px. As of right now, though, I'm focusing on more severe usability issues and bugfixes, like getting responsiveness on the forum to work (at all). A fix will be coming for that soon, I promise.
  • I personally thought it looks nice, but it might be better if some of that was shaved off. It's mainly aesthetics.
  • I still don't know what's causing that. I'm pretty sure it's something with the Bootstrap affix component, but why it doesn't happen with the dynamically generated tabs is a little confusing to me. Scrolling up and down should fix it temporarily.
  • The thought occurred to me, but I didn't know about the faking the times thing. I have some issues to work out in zRSSfeed before I can do that, though (I want the feeds to show the entire length of the post, not a snippet as it does now).
  • That was something that I manually coded in while testing the main site, and to this day I still don't know how to fix it. Back before I got the RSS feed reader implemented properly, my first goal was to get the tab plugin in Bootstrap working properly, so I set up a few tabs that would show some static HTML content. For some reason, the updatesContent div would have a height of zero, no matter what I tried (examining the div with Chrome's HTML debugger said that the div height was zero, but the code within overflowed onto the rest of the page, causing a really ugly display). I picked the minds of some of my more knowledgeable friends, but none of us could figure out what was happening. Eventually, as I continued to fret out over it, I said "screw it," inserted a manual height somewhere in the 1500px range, and called it a temporary day. I never got around to fixing it. Now that I have a little more HTML/CSS experience, though, I'll give it another whack. Maybe I'll be able to make it work properly.
  • I've noticed that on my end as well. I'm not quite sure what's happening there.

Thank you so much for all of your feedback. I'm working on a new build of the site later today, so I'll implement fixes for some of the more glaring issues.




EDIT: I have a new build of LyokoBoot that should fix a couple of usability problems that you guys are experiencing, as well as some various bugs that I've noticed throughout. I'm going to release it on Monday or Tuesday, after I bug test it. Included in the new version is:
  • The profile bar on the left of each post is smaller now, and everything in it is centered. The username now goes on the top of the avatar, and some UI elements have been spaced out to flow better. It is designed for 150x150 px avatars.
  • The BBCode buttons on the posting editor are now smaller and take up less room. The text field now correctly stretches to the bottom of the page, rather than only part of the way like before.
  • All of the links in the "Forum" menu in the navbar have been fixed (there is a duplicate slash in each of the URLs; it doesn't impact site performance, but it's annoying to me), and now update based on whether you're logged into the forum or not (forum only).
  • There is a board breadcrumbs navigation at the bottom of each page now, rather than the "Return to <board>" button in the current built.
  • Page navigation now uses standard Bootstrap pagination instead.
  • Updates the silhouettes of the Lyoko Warriors to be floating images instead of being baked into the image banner; this can potentially allow for them to be interactive in the future.
  • Attempted to fix logo hiding code so it consistently shows below the 200px mark (in the current build, scrolling too fast might cause the logo to not show or hide).
  • Adjusted the board descriptions to not wrap under the board images.
  • The [hr] tag is now more visible and does not have all of the padding that it currently does.
I really gotta fix up this theme
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Re: New website look

Postby TheAppleFreak » Sat Jun 22, 2013 12:07 am

Just pushed a quick patch to LyokoBoot. Updates include:

  • Links in the Forum menu in the navbar are no longer formatted like "/forum//[link]" and now have the correct number of slashes
  • New alert for new and unread PMs.
  • Forum menu is now more useful
  • Scattered usability fixes

If you don't see the changes, clear your cache. For those of you wondering where all of those promised tweaks are, this was a very quick build that fixed some things that really irked me.

In terms of more substantial updates, I've been giving some serious thought to what role the main site plays in our community, as well as what I did right and wrong with Lyoko Freak 2013.1. I've also been reflecting on my role within Lyoko Freak, and the direction that I'm taking the site in (that's a post for another day/thread). Either way, I've been thinking about the role of the different services that we offer, and how their full potential for serving information can be enhanced and made much more pleasant to use. In any case, it's looking like a new code revamp. Unlike with Lyoko Freak 2013.1, I want this next revision to be much more open, much more exposed to the harsh winds of criticism, so I can make a better site. There's some more stuff happening in the near future,
I really gotta fix up this theme
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