Design and Layout Suggestions

[zourtney]

To continue what we were saying before, about reorganizing the site's categories:

I think we could slim down to the following sections:
Home | Motors | Rec | Tech | Blogs | Forum | Gallery | About

Anything lingering under Reviews or Opinion that we want to keep should be shuffled over to a blog entry (can we change this without creating a new node?).

The left sidebar is another can of worms. Mostly, I think it can go away.

[Brad]

I like it!

I don't have a blog though

[Nick]

Everyone has a blog. You just never made any posts to it that I know about so I didn't add it to the side menu. It would be easy to do if you would like to have one in the list with the others

I think it could all work. How should the blog pages look? Do we have a general blog landing page with snippets from all the blogs to lead people to the individual ones? Or should we have a blog landing page broke out into columns/rows detailing a post or two from all the blogs? Or perhaps just a list off all the active blogs. Or no landing page at all, just have a drop down menu from the main menu item with all the blogs listed...

[zourtney]

Given the limited nature of our site's topics, I wouldn't mind dropdowns on that top navbar. Like, for the blogs, you could make a dropdown entry for each one of us. But if you click on the link you just get them all mashed together like we have now...or a nicer landing page would be alright, too.

[Nick]

Either would be fairly simple to do. I think making a nicer landing page would be good. Though that would get cluttered/hard to do if we had more then 5 or 6 blogs.

[zourtney]

I'm definitely, definitely in favor of landing pages for the major subsections of Randomland -- Motors in particular needs it. I'm kind of "take it or leave it" for the other sections, since they have less content. But yeah!

If you're bored, mock something up so we can look at it. I tried a couple of times, but never had much vision. And thus, gave up.

[zourtney]

I'm going to rearrange the forum categories a bit. Complain if you hate it...

EDIT: ok, I'm done. I moved the categories around to be in the same order as they'd appear in the main site's top navbar. Opine away.

EDIT #2: I've started converting Opinion and Review nodes into blog entries. I've been removing the opinion/ and review/ from the URLs and replacing it with the author's name. At least half of the stuff is being changed to "unpublished" (I don't like deleting, ok?) Almost all of the entries are mine, so I'm guessing that nobody cares and will be less embarrassed of Randomland as a whole, this way. Just know that Google will be linking up to nonexistent pages for years to come. But....oh well?

[zourtney]

Ok, that stuff has been rearranged. Let me know how much you hate it.

Question: how do you edit the text of these pages -- Opinion and Reviews? I want to put a little note that says these sections have been shut down, but they don't have the normal tabs across the top. Whatever text I changed under the "Menu" admin surely did not change the text that shows up there.

EDIT for all the uncaring masses, I've started removing links to the old gallery. Where I can (like here), I am replacing it with an [rlimg] tag. Inaction didn't seem to phase out the old gallery, so I guess I must do it.

[Nick]

That text is in the taxonomy stuff I think.

I think the blog landing page needs some help.... but I have no concrete idea what to do when I look at it. Just another "not like that" feeling.

I will join you in fixing the images when I find them!

[zourtney]

Darn. I was hoping someone had some ideas other than "not like that."

Let's see...
we could...uh...
make some boring text saying "this is blogland"
then list out each one of us who has a blog (just three of us at the moment).

Maybe like
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  pic   |  zourtney -- ancient randomlander who writes too much crap |
|  here  |              on the randomnets.                            |
|        | 47 posts, member since 2002.                               |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

|---------------------------------------------------------------------|
|  pic   |  nick -- founder and Mr Server himself! Picking up slack   |
|  here  |          and slappin' out swamp-diving references.         |
|        | 31 posts, member since 2002.                               |
|---------------------------------------------------------------------|

...


It would be nice to have something of a public profile. I've kinda wanted that for years (despite the fact that not a single person in the whole wide world would be interested enough to intentionally view it).

[Nick]

We could do something like that. And list the five most recent post titles below each name. Also, I think it would be easy to make a profile page for each member with the drupals. If the default member page is not to your liking then I am sure there is a module to make a new one/change it up. We could even make a new page type for member info or something.

[zourtney]

welllll, the only thing we have in place for a "member page" is the default thing which looks like any other admin page. And I really dislike the layout of the admin pages. I find them to be difficult to navigate and visually..."blaaaahhhh."

I once ran across a module which set up the administration stuff into a "dashboard" like page. You know, kind of a grid layout with icons/text links. But it seemed to have little community support at the time. To me, that layout seems to make the most sense.

I thought that WordPress's admin pages were slightly lacking...then we moved to Drupal! 
(sorry, I'm coming off Anti-Drupalist today, though I am not)

[Nick]

Everything I see about druapl 7 says the admin pages will be a little more friendly. But in the mean time a little sprucing up to ours would be nice.

[zourtney]

off the topic of admin pages, but....
How hard would it be to implement dropdown menus on that top navver? I was thinking something along the lines of


-----------------------------------------------
| Home | Blogs | [...the rest]
-----------------------------------------------
       | Brad     |
       | Jacsveus |
       | Nick     |
       | Zourtney |
       ------------

[Nick]

I think all the stuff we need is already installed. One would just have to figure it out. I'll take a look before I get to involved in stuff today.