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[Fangu]

What I mean is, this was a perfectly working feature on the previous version; you could hold in ctrl and left click and move the mouse to choose the area you wanted to crop, and the box you made would be true to the ratio you'd put into the boxes. But now when you hold in ctrl, the box can turn into whatever.

They're getting somewhere with the image stuff though, I'll give them that. But I was fond of ye olde aspect ratio thingy. Now I'll have to make one myself, and that takes time I don't have.

So until then, check the width and height of your featured image and make sure it's 2:1 (height half the size of width.)

Edit: HOLY COW IT'S SHIFT, NOT CTRL!!
sorry wp
sorry



(a check box would still be easier though)

 

[Tetsujin]

Is writing something about the upcoming Final Symphony concert relevant to this site btw?

 

[Cthulhu]

'tis, go for it

 

[Lex]

Yeah tis a good idea. If no one else wants to grab it I can tackle it over the weekend.

 

[Tetsujin]

You're actually going?

 

[Fangu]

He was drunk when he wrote that, go ahead and do a review Tets, awesome idea

 

[Tetsujin]

 

[Flintlock]

Here is my latest draft for the 2013 front page. It retains the basic layout of my first draft, while implementing some of the ideas from the second. Here are the notable changes (from the first draft) and the motivation behind them:

• I wanted to make better use of the right-hand column, as I had in the second draft, based on Fangu's suggestion. However, I still wanted to keep the descriptions for the three news items in the left-hand column. It wasn't easy to make them both fit, but I managed it by reducing margins and making them consistent across the whole front page. This image shows that there are basically only two margin sizes now: 24px (blue) and 12px (green). Previously I had been using 40px and 20px. I know that we won't be coding the front page in terms of pixels, but that's how large I think they ought to be when the page is viewed at its maximum size. I'll be working on other layouts (e.g. mobile devices) once we have agreed on a draft for the full size. The information density has gone up a lot, particularly at the top of the page, which is the first thing visitors see. I just hope it doesn't look too crowded now; if it does, we can experiment with adding <hr> tags to break it up a little without changing the overall layout (like BBC News, for example).
• The happening now bar has been moved to the banner, so that it takes up less room. I still think we should be able to switch it off when there's nothing worth writing there.
• I've removed the Related posts links, due to the complications that have been discussed in this thread and in order to save space. The Discussion (forum) links remain, but aside from the top story, they no longer actually say "Discussion". Ever since we started using the materia orb as a bullet point, I have been wanting to give it a clear meaning, and in this draft, I finally settled on one: it means that the accompanying link directs to our forum.
• The forum box in the right-hand column has been brought forward from the second draft. I had to tweak it a little to make it fit the smaller horizontal space available. You may have noticed that there are forums called "Some other forum" and "Yet another forum" at the bottom of the list. I wasn't sure what to put there. We can either pick another two sub-forums to go there or just tweak the layout or the line spacing so there's no empty space there. The forum logo is also temporary; I just had to come up with something that was a bit wider than the Final Fantasy VII "X" I used in the second draft.

I'd love to say that this is our last draft, but I don't think it's perfect by any means; if anyone has any comments, criticisms or suggestions, I would appreciate hearing them. I'm still willing to make changes, and as I have more free time now, I should be able to try them out pretty quickly. My main concern is that it looks too crowded right now. What do you think?

 

[Fangu]

I can work with this, looks good. Forum box new version: Looks really nice. Everything looks easy to do, except for the "Happening Now" banner covering the banner. Doable, yes; possible pain in the ass for bugs and fuck-ups in the 7 different browsers, zillion different pad browsers and gazillion different mobile browsers: Yes. Especially since a small width on browser will turn 1 line of words into 2, hence taking up a bigger space of the banner since the banner itself only shrinks and text is not scalable like images. So; I'd rather not.

Wow I'm starting to sound like Yop.

 

[Cthulhu]

Nah, then you'd go "cba", . I don't see any major issues with the 'happening now' overlay, the transparency effect can be done with CSS3 in modern browsers (iirc) and will / should just be 'flat' / non-transparent on older browsers - which are in the minority, by the way. As for the width of it on smaller screens, I'm not actually sure.

 

[Fangu]

Exercise for everyone, especially Flint: Open the current size in a browser window and scale the browser window to smallish, you will see what I'm talking about

 

[Lex]

^Yeah that drove me nuts with the TLS chat window, you're stuck with green page borders no matter how small you try to make it. I don't like that it does that btw, but I respect that it's necessary/ an excellent feature for mobile devices etc.

 

[Tetsujin]

He was drunk when he wrote that, go ahead and do a review Tets, awesome idea

I hope I'll be able to do this and still remember the songs played by tomorrow.

Boatloads of never played before songs. For FFVII, there were arrangements of Tifa's Theme, The Great Warrior, Jenova Absolute, Interrupted by Fireworks, Countdown, The Planet's Crisis, Anxious Heart and a choirless version of OWA.

The FFVII medley was probably about 30 - 40 minutes long.

 

[Lex]

I am actually so jealous that you got to go to that, looking forward to your review

 

[Tetsujin]

I'm kind of dreading it.

Already details are slipping my mind because there was so much and the medleys were so long. It doesn't help that there was no livestream this time that could have refreshed my memory (indeed, no recording or plans for a CD either D: )

 

[Jiro]

I really like the latest draft. I can see enough without scrolling, but I'm still tempted to scroll and see the rest. It looks inviting and I dunno something about the colour scheme is just excellent. I mean it's the same colour scheme anyway but I just thought that whoever designed this shit should get some extra pats on the back from me.

Love the columns, love the way the non-image stories at the very bottom are presented. Looking good all round imo. Wish I had more to offer than "does this look aesthetically pleasing y/n" but seems you've got this covered anyway!

 

[Lex]

*cracks whip on self*

I'm going to plow through some of those pages over the coming weeks. Kind of just bumping this thread - is anyone working on anything right now (other than those I'm in contact with via PM)?

 

[Fangu]

Funny you should mention it - I'm updating the test server (fhtagn) at the moment so it's more or less identical to the current site. It's step 1 on working on new shit

 

[Flintlock]

I've made a bit of progress on a narrow-browser (e.g. mobile) draft front page, but I haven't touched it in a while. I've been doing other things, including writing three articles for TLS. I've got a few days off coming up, though, so I'll try to pick it up again.

 

[Fangu]

^ With your latest draft, you don't really have to. As long as stuff is blocked nicely, they'll just be piled up in a nice column. I might have explained that poorly but you don't really have to do a detailed design for pads and phones, just keep them in mind when you design the web version. As long as stuff can be blocked in a nice and readable way, there's no need for making a 100% custom design for pads and phones.

 

[Flintlock]

Oh, alright

 

[Fangu]

Stuff,

* Updated fhtagn/ test server to WP 3.5.1, added TablePress, Blubrry (podcast plugin) and Post Type Switcher so they're there on the test server too should they break anything. Updated Akismet and All in One SEO Pack. I didn't bother with the rest of them as they're fairly big plugins I trust (WP Super Cache, Google XML Sitemaps, Google Analyticator, Feed Statistics) but keep them in mind as plugins can break shit etc.
* Overwrote the entire theme folder (lifestream4) with the folder from the current site so any live update on the current server should be present on the old one.

Then for some changes:
* Changed the mysql_ calls in forumcall.php to mysqli as mysql is to be depricated
* Swapped parent theme of lifestream4 from Twenty Eleven to Twenty Twelve - nothing seemed to break (hooray!) so I'm now calling this version "The Lifestream 4 - for Twenty Twelve", which makes it version 2 of The Lifestream 4 (version 1 being the one we released November 2012)
* Tried to access phpmyadmin but apparently somethings gone wrong somewhere - spent about 2 hours trying to figure out what is wrong through SSH, came up with nothing. I wanted to investigate some vB stuff but I should have known to stay away from it.

So... that's basically all I cba with today. Heh.

Edit: Wait. Twenty Twelve did not go smoothly.

* All h's have an extra font weight in the new TT CSS. Fixed by overruling in Lifestream4 CSS.
* All links had an underline. Set all a's to default not have underlines (since that's the general thing we do)
* The top menu is massively fucked. I don't know if it's manual haxes on TLS's side or the Twenty Twelve. But it needs to be seriously fixed, along with the fact that the menu has never looked the same in the big browsers.
* There's faults with added padding and stuff on the footer. Working on it.
* Major fuckery on singles and pages. Have no idea what's going on, might be related to sidebar stuff. Edit: It is. .left-sidebar #primary is doing something weird, might be because we manually hacked out the sidebar. Edit: Fixed by setting "Default Layout" to "One-column, no sidebar" under "Appearance" in the WP admin panel. Edit: Nope, that only did it for singles, but not for pages and Archive indexes.

I'll see what I can do about it, since adjusting to TT is good. I guess.

Edit again: This is gonna take a bit more time than I first though, but it's a good exercise in making stuff as streamlined as possible. I understand way more this time around how WordPress thinks when they make changes to their CSS. Anyway there would be changes for the new version anyway, so it's no big deal.

 

[Lex]

We need to discuss the canonicity of Maiden Who Travels the Planet.

Short version: Written by someone who is not in creative control of the VII world or story, but published in an official book with (as far as I'm aware) no inclination that it was written by such a person.

Facts only please, no LTD crap or snideness.

If we can't come to a clear decision I'm just going to change the disclaimer to mention that it wasn't written by someone with creative control or something to that effect.

 

[Shademp]

See LTD post

It is going to take some time to discuss this, I think.

Currently this page describes Maiden as glorified fanfiction (which is actually something I wrote when I made that page) but in my opinion that paragraph can be changed to say nothing or the other. Feel free to edit that part, Lex.

My view of how FFVII canon works has changed over the last 1-2 years.

 

[Dashell]

I agree with everything Prince Lex said in his LTD post honestly.