Design and Layout Suggestions

[zourtney]

Yeah, I'm not sure what to do about that, but it was just one of those ideas I was toying with. If we do it, it would be good to have a plan. Not that we ever use those..! I'm not particularly fond of the side menus at the moment, but i can't say what exactly bothers me about them... Anyway, yeah.

[zourtney]

Today, Nick and I were toying with the idea of obliterating the sidebars in the main site. Opinions? What do you* think would be easiest/best?

I like the clean look of no sidebars (top nav only), but we would actually loose some functionality. For example, where in the world would the poll go? (Nevermind the fact that it went missing all on its own  )
I think replacing the left-side category menus with "landing pages" would actually improve ease of use. As it is, the Francine story (for example) is given a randomland.net/motors/francine/xxx url, but going to the motors root page (randomland.net/motors) just gives you a bland listing of all posts under that section...in reverse order, mind you. This is particularly unhelpful for reading through "books."

Ok. I'll shut up. Your* turn.

* You[r] (pl.)

[Nick]

I kinda like the idea of the poll having autonomy. Coming and going as it likes. Sadly not the case though. I could write a script that turns off random blocks for arbitrary periods of time though

I agree that the site need more work. Things need better organized, we need some guidelines for posting (like what should go where, what constitutes a page, a story, a blog post etc.) We need better ways of finding content other then hoping that the great googlebot will bestow a favorable page ranking on up and people will stumble upon thing of interest. Though that too is a goal.   All in all we need organized. And I am much better at talking about doing that then I am at even trying to think about how that would be done. So some discussion is needed. 

^{"it seems a little time is needed
Decisions to be made
The good advice of friends unheeded
The best of plans mislaid"}

Or so the story goes.

[zourtney]

@motors section pagers

http://randomland.net/sites/all/modules/smfforum/index.php/topic,25.msg601.html#msg601

I agree, they are nonsense. I was trying to use the Drupilian powers to arrange things in a hierarchical manner such that the breadcrumbs made sense. It worked, but had the side effect of being more confusing.

I like the Up button. I think that should be everywhere. Prev-Next links on the posts are by no means unprecedented (see "every wordpress theme ever" and "internet"). However, I have never, ever liked it.

In theory, we could add a little PHP logic to the theme. Also, there is most likely some crazy collection of modules you can install which eventually would make it work after 5-6 hours of "gaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!?!."

[Nick]

Its looking like there are a collection of modules to do anything you want. But you need a degree in drupal before you will know what they do and why you would want to do that and how they will interact with other things. Its kinda like chemistry, but then its more like alchemy because you might eventually get some gold from adding various things together in a nice little melting pot. But then no one else will see it because the access controls got messed up some how. And the poll might just go out for a walk in the middle of it. But in the end drupal is our "linux o'da internet" friend. 

[zourtney]

I like how things are shaping up on these random nets. It's my home-away-fro
-usefulness.

I am liking how the newly installed Drupal image modules are working out. It is not easy to use, but I think it fits our site's needs. Plus, I like wasting a day writing a php module we may or may not use. It was a good learning experience; I will do a little writeup tomorrow.

[Nick]

I would like to see that. Then I will know what it is you did

[zourtney]

I'm almost done. I had to bag up like 15lbs of meat last night and that takes a long time because I'm slow.

On another note, I created a symlink called 'forums' in the randomland folder so 'www.randomland.net/forums' should be a valid url now. It's a little prettier and certainly easier to remember. Any objections? I'm not sure if there is a better way to go about it.

I notice that 'forums.randomland.net' is set to redirect to the 'sites/all/modules/smfforum'.

[Nick]

I recently added that to fix the broken links. I hopped that a redirect would be better then masking (I think google know when both are happening but maybe the redirect wont make for duplicate or confused googlee-box indexings.) If you know of any reason not to do this, then let me know. I have toyed with the idea of setting things up a little differently since out DNS people dont do wild cards, what I could do is like with test.randomland and mail.randomland is set another address to be updated thats forum(s).randomland have have apache treat the forums directory as www-root for that domain. I always just wanted /forums to work and sim-link does that. But if anyone wants the forums.randomland to act normal we can do that too.

[zourtney]

I was gun-ho for subdomaining everything before, but I'm not so sure now. The 'randomland.net/[section]' seems to work well. As it is, both forums.randomland.net and randomland.net/forums are working now. I have noticed that is was forum.randomland.net at one point (on the old boards). As such, we are getting a lot of broken links. Could we just dump all of those "forum." 404ers onto the current board, or something?

[Nick]

Both forums.randomland and forum.randomland will work now. They just redirect to the normal path (so all the links should be fixed and working correctly.) They can exist for backwards compatibility.

[zourtney]

Cool. That makes good sense.

In other news, hot sauce is still awesome.
Also, Randomland's stylesheet isn't parsing properly in Internet Explorer. I'll put that in the "Bugs" topic.

[zourtney]

I changed the forum's stylesheet so I can see links a little better. It was fun having them all hidden and stuff, but they're green now, like the main site.

Which brings me to a suggestion: can we make an official color palette? I find myself digging through the stylesheet to find the HEX color values. Let's write 'em down. I'll start (a lot of them are hard to see on this background):

#449900
#4b7f00
#497a1b
#68a055
#2c642a
#689146
#445c3a
#3a425c
#c1d4ea
#2763a5
#6191c5
#b5c9d8
#4070a1
#cfd0da
#dbdce7
#d7e3f0
#2266ab
#8697a9
#eeeeee
#e1e1e1
#ecedf1
#f1f1f5
#efefef
#eaeaea
#d8d8d8
#ebf2f8
#ffc600
#5f4e25
#413021

[Nick]

I like the idea. We should make a little things some place that talks about the randomland theme and how it came to be. That would be a good place for a nice little color reference guide. Or maybe not. I don't know. At the very least a page dedicated to the randomland palate.

[zourtney]

Agreed. Should this be a public page? Colors are never secret information. However, I can see the use of something similar for various logins (Google, YouTube, etc). But storing that info online is a bad idea.