Site Design

[Flintlock]

I suppose that's one of the advantages to switching to a new theme.

Are we sure that vB plugin works with vB3?

Yes, 3.8, which is what we're running.

I dunno, I've always liked the 'old feel' of this place, because New gets old quite quickly, and what really matters anyway, is that the thing is somewhat user friendly and actually works. That's what makes people come back. The web/ phones/ stuff is changing design and standards in a very rapid pace these days - and with good reason; it's the same old 'change shit so people want the New Shit and then we make money'. I'm not really into all of that. It's kind of like buying a new pair of shoes just because they're new, and then two weeks later you want a newer pair.

I know I sound old and tired saying this, but I've worked with too many UX and marketing people over the last two years that I know that what people WANT NOW OMG BECAUSE LOOK EVERYONE ELSE HAS IT AAAAAA is rarely a good reason to change user interface and functionality. Look at what you want to achieve before buying those choose. What do we really want? I'd say a good structure of the written words, where people feel like they can easily interact. That's what should be the heart of the thing. Not 'we want to look professional', because a) the content should reflect that, and b) we aren't anyway

(Sorry if I sound like a bitch, I've been at a developer conference all day and then moved crap around in my new place for hours and now I've had a well deserved Pale Ale)

You don't sound like a bitch, you sound like someone who knows what they're talking about, which is why I suggested you in the first place.

I'm aware that I probably push for too much change sometimes, but a lot of that is because I know there are just as many people who don't want to change anything, and my hope is that we'll reach a compromise. Still, go back to my original idea for the consultation and you'll see that my first question was "what are our most pressing reasons to upgrade?". I know I don't have all the answers.

For me, it's a question of a) tools and b) Yop. And c) project management drains a developer and I do enough of that at work (omg this thing needs to be green like right now omgggg you're the tech FUCKING FIX IT ALREADY AAAAA) and I have a feeling it's the same for Yop.

I can't really say anything about that.

 

[Lex]

Are we bottlenecking the front page update behind a forum upgrade or not? Yay or nay? I ask because I'm about to start fucking around with local offline server stuffs and there's no point to the utter brainfuckery of learning all of that if it's for no reason at all.

Fangu, whatever you want to do I'm on board with. You did an amazing job with the last redesign and I know how much it drained you. I also know how much personal stuff can affect your work but it seems like you're in a good place so it's up to you, I can totally respect not wanting to do it because it's what you do every day. This is one of the main reasons I'm advocating changing to a common Wordpress theme and just editing it to our liking. I can deal with customising it a bit through CSS and the php ini file and stuff, there are clear as day instructions all over the internet.

I can't go and start poking around in the code that you created. That front page is useless to us if we want to change it, because you're the only one who kind of knows "where everything is". So it really needs to be changed now if we (the non developers) want to be able to customise how it's laid out and what's displayed on there. If there's one thing I'd really appreciate is that you maybe help in the sense of "oh fuck I broke everything can you take a quick look at this please?" while new stuff is being implemented. Yop is there for that too, but it'd be really good to have both of you as kind of consultants just incase anything goes wrong. Just in the sense of if we can't figure it out after trying for a long time, we can ask you.

 

[Cthulhu]

There's plenty of stuff I could do to the site in terms of design and technical implementation, I mean I've done mainly front-end stuff full-time at work for a couple of years now. It's mostly a matter of project management - I need direction, and I'd prefer to not need to have to wait for 24 hours or more to get feedback on anything.

Re: forum software, I should probably have another look around; thing is, most modern forum software is all about re-imagining the core of forums - i.e. discussion - on a modern software stack, and I'm pretty sure most people here would prefer to stay on the old style. That probably writes off Discourse, even if it's the moast modern and actively developed software out there. Plus it's not intended for customization and user-personalization nearly as much as vB and the other traditional wossnames are.

Could look into that one made by the old vB developers, but at the same time I'm afraid it won't actually be any newer or more modern than our current version of vB is. I'll have to look into it.

If we had moar monies available, I'd totally hire a designer to give us a fresh and original look and feel (I know a guy, etc). Unfortunately, that costs a small fortune (think thousands), plus it'd basically be limited to ideas only; the real work is in implementation. We should probably make Plans, make a to-do list, and I should take a week off work and get cracking.

I wouldn't postpone working on the front page in favor of dealing with the forums; if we have momentum in that area now, we should keep it up. And TBF I doubt we'd reach any consensus on the forum software any time soon; we've got a lot of people with strong opinions on the matter.

 

[Flintlock]

Are we bottlenecking the front page update behind a forum upgrade or not? Yay or nay? I ask because I'm about to start fucking around with local offline server stuffs and there's no point to the utter brainfuckery of learning all of that if it's for no reason at all.

That's not really my call to make, but if you can find a theme that can be easily adapted to the same basic layout as our forum, then you can definitely start trying it out.

Edit: looks like Yop made the call already. I got ninja'd.

Everything else you said: +1.

 

[Ⓐaron]

For whatever it's worth, I'm on board with what people have suggested thus far. I'm not really that knowledgeable on how the front end / WordPress work but if you need help getting the forum integration going (since it looks like that's the direction we're going in) I'll do what I can.

 

[Lex]

At this stage I'm happy for them to remain separate entities while we figure out what new theme looks good on the front page. Yes, there's going to be a bit of a disjointed feeling re: theme, but there are concessions I don't think we should be making here. Like not utilising full horizontal space with a wider theme because the forum layout is narrow, to me that's dumb.

 

[Ⓐaron]

See, I like narrower themes. I have a 1920x1080 monitor and if they use all the horizontal screen real estate it becomes almost impossible to read anything unless I scale the text size up. I think the current forum theme is about optimal width for most people's purposes, although to be honest I usually use the even narrower one.

 

[Flintlock]

Out of interest, how easy would it be to widen our forum? Comparing it to the other sites I visit every day, I'd say it could go about 25% wider. We'd just have to keep a narrow skin for people like Aaron.

Edit: this post originally included a comment about variable width, which I then removed, but is mentioned in the discussion below.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Well, if we get rid of the background gradient, it would be effortless. If we keep the background gradient it would be harder but probably still possible. Please don't do that though. I don't want the forum to fill my entire 1920x1080 monitor by default.

 

[Lex]

The width thing - which btw, fangu implemented on the front page - would be good for mobile browsing.

EDIT: Aaron, such a feature already exists on the front page with the background gradient.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Huh? The front page looks fixed-width to me.

Another problem with making the forum variable-width would be that there wouldn't really be any way to make the banner look good.

 

[Flintlock]

Shrink your browser window until it's narrower than the "normal" width and it will shrink. Do the same on the forum and it will give you a nasty horizontal scrollbar.

Anyway, adaptive images are a thing now.

 

[Lex]

^What Flint said.

Anyway I'm installing the virtualbox stuff tonight so I might have some images to share in the morndag re: new designs and stuff.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Oh, so it does. Well, I have no problem with making the forum decrease width if the screen is made narrower than the maximum width, but I don't want it to exceed 1,000 pixels wide or whatever the current span is now. I'm also not even sure it's possible to edit vBulletin's style so it does that (I'm not sure how it's implemented on the WordPress, if it's HTML5 or what). Also, the gradient doesn't look very good when it's smaller than maximum width. Maybe we should just get rid of it. Gradients are considered kind of passé now anyway.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Don't make the forum any wider then it is already. I've also got a 1920x1080 moneter and this is one of the few sites where I can actually browse it in full-screen. Most other sites are always viewed in windowed mode as line length is so long that I have to move my head as I read.

From my perspective, the front page and the forums are the same width.

 

[Lex]

They are the same width. We're saying that if you make your browser window smaller on the front page (or anywhere on this site that isn't the forums), it adapts to the width of your browser. This is intentional so that it works well on mobile. Having the same thing on the forums would probably make mobile browsing a bit easier.

A seperate issue is that I want to go for a wider theme for the front page, but that's unrelated to the discussion we just had.

 

[Claymore]

Great to hear that we're not delaying a front page upgrade.

I see no reason why the front page has to retain the same dimensions as the forum. Having a wider width is a major benefit that shouldn't be restricted because it differs from the forum.

Lex, do you want Fraction, or some of the other paid ones I've got, to just play around with and test?

 

[Fangu]

Obs, you really need to learn about the @media css feature. See the style sheet/ watch Chrome in f12 to see what happens as you drag the browser window smaller and bigger. This is pretty much the heart of responsifying through css.

 

[Cthulhu]

I can see how ATM the available real-estate isn't used very well on larger monitors, but at the very least, don't make the text itself wider - long lines are harder to read. I like the paragraph width as it is ATM.

There's plenty of stuff that can be done with sidebars and shit though. I'll refer to http://tweakers.net/ which has a sidebar (if your monitor is wide enough to display it). Else, it just plasters that space with ads,

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Pages that I think are done:

Site Goals
- this page needs to be changed ASAP will all the new traffic we're getting. There's some things that could be done a little better, but it's so much better then what the current page looks like.

Franchise Guide
- needless to say this is going to need some more entries on it. I've put in a placeholder for the remake page which I'll get to after finishing up this project.

Canon of FFVII

Guide Book Translation
- not sure if I like the way the translators section is set up (organized by translator). I think it might be better if it was organized by work, but it's okay for now. We've got worse pages to do.

FFVII - The Original

Pages I can't work on without knowing what goes on it:

Site Staff
-I don't know who is supposed to go on here. If someone could provide me with a list of people who should be on here and what their positions are, that would be great.

 

[Lex]

I swear I did the site staff page at some point last year.

There are a full list of names in the thread from Decemberish where we appointed new editors etc. When you're doing it, list current site staff only and either add a separate section or page that lists previous staff and their roles. Bear in mind that forum staff and site staff are not the same, but we may want to add a separate section for those who are purely forum staff.

 

[Elessar]

Install the trial versions of the various forum softwares on subdomains and let users try it out. Put it to a vote.

 

[Pixel]

Does anyone know if theres a link for this within the navigation? I can't find one. I thought th it was linked to in the novel/novellas section. I dont think theres any way for people to find the content. :/
http://thelifestream.net/lifestream...-biography-turks-the-kids-are-alright-part-1/

 

[Obsidian Fire]

^^ It should go under this http://thelifestream.net/novels-novellas/ page. One of the thing's I'm taking a look at as I go is what pages should be made for the individual novels, so that they don't all have to be on one page. And a lot of that involves going though the archives.

We really could use some more index type pages for things like series (the best seven series for example), but I've got enough on my plate reformatting the current index pages as it is. Once that's done, I'll go on a massive archive crawl...

 

[Cthulhu]

Install the trial versions of the various forum softwares on subdomains and let users try it out. Put it to a vote.

There should be demo versions of most forum softwares out there; I'd put up a demo of VB5... somewhere the other day, it wasn't met with much enthusiasm, . I could set up subdomains and install the forum softwares everywhere, but it'd probably be a couple hours work. Much more if I were to do an import (if possible) of our poasts.

Ergo... have a browse, see what's out there. As far as I know, the big players are still Discourse, VB5, SimpleMachines (which we started out with back in '08, but we moved to vB by popular demand and due to performance problems), Invision, PhpBB, and XenForo (from the original makers of vB). NodeBB (https://nodebb.org/) seems to pop up a lot too during a short search on 'forum software'; it appeals to my inner geek for being built on a modern software stack. It looks / feels a lot like Discourse though, but I'm pretty sure Discourse is the more mature and thoroughly developed platform (it's from the same people behind StackOverflow). I think there's a significant portion of users that prefers server-side rendered software though; Discourse and NodeBB both look / feel client-side (the fancy ajaxy infinite scroll thingy).

I think the main thing here is that too much change will cause a riot. I'd probably pick one of the latter ones if I were setting up a new site, but here, we can't change too much.