Design and Layout Suggestions

[zourtney]

Yeah, the forums definitely could use their pretty URL back. But, in due time.

A few other thoughts/suggestions I have:

• Make main nav bar full width, like the forum.
• Add About and Search items to main site nav (I added About, but it seems out of place as it is)
• Small search bar up top, so people can search Randomland. Maybe put "log in"/"log out" links up there too

Ok, see a bunny.

[zourtney]

So, I tried enabling the search block, but it has a few problems.

• I can't position it where I actually want it without editing the HTML
• It's really ugly because I don't know where the code for that block is (needs a background if it's going to be on the sidebar. And it should look less 1998.
• Most importantly, it does not return decent results. I searched for "mono" and got nothing (remember, I wrote that one post yesterday?)

[Nick]

Aaaa! You turned the copyright thing back on? While I don't mind it in its self I think it might be a little obtrusive. Or perhaps I was just startled by it as its new.

And I am not sure what happened to the search box... I am thinking that there used to be one in the header... I must have broke it and not noticed. Sounds like something I would do.  But either was we do need one, and one that works. I can work on the menu, though I kinda always liked it. I thought it looked clean, and "etched" comes to mind. But for the sake of site wide consistency it wouldn't hurt. The main site menu already uses the same button graphic as the forum one (just in blue.) It would be simple to use the green instead and change the menu containers display type or give it a background, or whatever needs dome.

[zourtney]

I guess I missed the fact that you (Nick) replied a few weeks ago. Yeah, I turned the footer back on. It's big and ugly, I agree. It is two separate blocks. And while the whole "blocks" idea is nice, the default padding is pretty huge. Perhaps a few little css tricks would fix it; but I kind of forgot about it

[zourtney]

Ok, this is relatively minor, but it would be nice if we could make the main site's theme a little more mobileweb friendly. Having to zoom isn't a big deal, but the post content still feels a little dwarfed by sidebars. It is more apparent on phoneywebs. By contrast, the forum theme isn't bad at all. How is it under the mobile IE?

[Nick]

I have mobile opera and mobile IE, soon I will have mobile firefox as well. I will give it a look and see what its like. The size of all the fields are set in CSS so its easy to change. I will have to play around with it a bit. Or you can too if you like.

[zourtney]

I was wondering, would it be easy to float:right that poll in the text body? (or something similar, since I believe it is a block)

[zourtney]

Ok, something I find more problematic:

When looking at Randomland's front page, it lists only excerpts of the post. This is what it's supposed to do, yeah. But it's not immediately obvious to me whether that is the full text or not. It seems like the "Read More" link should be immediately after the post body. Maybe it's just me?

[Nick]

Dude. I so know how to move those. I think. At the very least I could figure it out. Perhaps above the leave comment link and bolded. Not sure how else to make it clear that here is more to see. We could do like the register does and have a short caption and a title. But that does not lend well to most of the posts.

[zourtney]

I like your style on the turtle post, calling out a link to the full post. But it should do it automatically.

Better: we could manually write the excerpt text, all would be good; I can insert a hyperlink, dangit. I've run across an old Drupal module which supposedly lets you do that, but it sounds out of date or at least not officially supported. Throwing in <!--break--> works ok, but seems insufficient to me and apparently I'm not the only one.

Am I asking too much?
Hint: roll along and find the hidden-nugget links!  

[Nick]

Links show up as a distinct gray on my screen

I need to fix the input fields for drupal. I think I set them up wrong when I installed the whyswig editor thing. We want unfiltered HTML rather then the filtered HTML. I can enable the editor for that input format and then you can hyperlink away. And if you still want the raw HTML to edit there is a button that turns the editor off and another that provides the HTML in a popup.

But I agree that an automatic link would be nice. The more link is what we want, we just need to move it and make it a little more verbose... so its not in the actual article. I think there is a way to make a completely separate version of the post that is just for the preview. But I am not sure on that.

[Nick]

So I finally made the size adjustments to the poll and menu. The poll went from 290 px to 230 px and the menu from 210 to 190.

Let me know if this looks ok.

And I would love to see the footer become less obtrusive. I think its a little to tall. But that's just what I think.
Also, I like the idea of the teaser being separate text if one wants. (Courtney linked to this module http://drupal.org/node/272335 and it sounds like what we want.)

[Nick]

When making new posts the default input type is "unfiltered HTML" So your tags will show up and you can use shift+enter and enter for line breaks and new paragraphs. URLs will automatically turned into links when you preview or submit and I activated some gallery thing. I don't know what it does. Enjoy.

[Nick]

AAaaannnnnd. I added a plugin for the gallery that ties it into the XML sitemap that google looks at to find new pages. So our pictures will be indexed. Be warned.Or something.

[Nick]

I installed the Excerpt plugin. It looks like it works. I don't have anything to post tonight so I didn't test it.