Here’s a mock-up for the new site front page:
None of the links work, nor has the CSS been adjusted to work in IE (so if you’re not looking at this in Firefox, then you’re not seeing what I’m intending for you to see).
The header and footer are intended to carry over to the forum, wiki, and bug reporter, which will help give us a uniform look across them. For the wiki, you can see sort of what this would look like here:
Looks really good Joel. Even in IE nothing immediately jumped out at me,
though I was looking more in FF
Your getting the same validation errors that I am on ladder code. Is this
something to do with the way php is using “>” tag and xhtml not
understanding it as php vs html tag usage?
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Very nice.
Can I steal the header for the CSW blog?
2009/1/31 Tim McCarron <timothy.mccarron@sbcglobal.net (timothy.mccarron@sbcglobal.net)>
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Thus spake “Tim McCarron”:
The two major differences between FF and IE are that you won’t have rounded
corners on the “road signs” or a 3-column layout for the news in IE, because
both of those are achieved using some CSS3 attributes which IE doesn’t
support yet. If we thought this was very important, I could probably hack
together something which would achieve the same effect in IE, at the cost
of some time, my sanity, and long-term maintainibility of the code.
I’ve fixed all of the errors except the missing alt attributes, which I’ll
do later. The primary problem was not having a title element as a child of
the head element. The message you get when you forget to put in a title
element is rather misleading, as it focuses on having mismatched tags. It’s
only in the second paragraph where it mentions that this can be also be
caused by omitting a mandatory element.
–
J.
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Thus spake “Tim McCarron”:
BTW, if you want some help sorting those out, you could point me to where
the script lives.
–
J.
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On Feb 1, 2009, at 3:13 AM, Joel Uckelman wrote:
FWIW it seems to look good in Safari.
Rounded corners and 3-column Calendar.
I really like the calendar view of the news, BTW.
It all looks good. If I have any changes to recommend, it is just
some very minor alignment notes, but they aren’t that important, and
anyway should wait until the page gets closer to finished.
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Thus spake Thomas Russ:
Thanks, but I can’t take credit for devising that, only seeing somewhere
else (mozilla.org/) and adapting it somewhat.
I’d like to have your comments on alignment sooner rather than later, if
possible, as the CSS I’m using here I’m intending to be used everywhere.
–
J.
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On Feb 1, 2009, at 10:33 AM, Joel Uckelman wrote:
Well, the main thing would be to try to get a grid-like alignment of
the elements in the two columns. Now, depending on the dynamics of
the columns, that may not really be possible in the long run, but
just from looking at the prototype I would try to align like:
What is Vassal? Get Vassal
~~~~ ~~~ ~~ +----------+
~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~ | Download |
~~~~ ~~~ ~~ +----------+
What games are there? Get Help
~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~~~~
~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~~~~
~~~~~~ ~~ ~~~~~ ~ ~
+------+ +------+ Get Involved
| | | | ~~~~~ ~ ~ ~~~ ~~ ~ ~ ~
+------+ +------+ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~~~~
In other words, try to align headings across columns if it makes
sense. But since that really depends on the content and the size of
the images, I don't know if it will turn out to be practical or not.
But from the mockup, it looked like alignment would be possible
between the "What games are there?" and the "Get Help" and also
between the images undewr modules and the "Get Involved" header.
Also, the capitalization policy for headers needs to be consistent.
So either use "What Games are There? or "Get help", "Get involved",
"Latest news".
As I said, there are really minor layout/alignment tweaks.
-Tom.
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Post generated using Mail2Forum ([mail2forum.com](http://www.mail2forum.com))Thus spake Thomas Russ:
Why do you prefer that?
I was kind of expecting that at some point we’d replace all four of
the screenshots with a movie, where the upper two are now. That would
push the “Games” section down quite a ways.
I think I’ll switch to “What Games are There?”
–
J.
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Movie as in Actionscript/Flash or Embedded Youtube type video?
Hopefully not the latter - I always feel sites look somewhat cluttered with
those youtube embeds w/ their controls and just not fitting well with rest
of scheme
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Thus spake “Tim McCarron”:
I was thinking of some sort of screencast, so, yes, the latter.
–
J.
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Quality is usually always an issue with embeds so as long as its good
quality and fits, why am I to complain 
Taking a closer look - No RSS feed? Should there be?
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Thus spake “Tim McCarron”:
Do you mean that you don’t see any way to get an RSS feed? Or that the
RSS feeds for the page and the news don’t work? (The latter is the way
it’s supposed to be right now, since none of the links go anywhere yet.)
–
J.
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It was there, I just didn’t see it. Icon is kind of small and gets lost in
middle of page there.
Wouldn’t it be better at end of Menu bar or bottom of page (or in addition
to where it is now)
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Thus spake “Tim McCarron”:
There are two of them—one which is for the whole page, which I see at the
end of the address bar in Firefox, and the other which is just for the news,
which I see at the end of the “Latest News” heading. I think it would be
misleading to put the news feed anywhere else, since it’s not a feed for
the whole page.
–
J.
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also a big red button that says “Report a Bug in VASSAL”
Actually, I would prefer we don’t have that on the Web page.
Much better to add the ‘Report a bug in VASSAL’ menu option to the Module Manager (and probably Editor and Player also). Bug reports are far more useful with an errorlog to go with them.
B.
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Thus spake “Brent Easton”:
I’m with you on that one. I suspect that the reports we would get that way
would not be of the highest quality.
–
J.
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Some more sight dissecting.
The current site has a login PLUS a forum login.
Judging by new layout if all is to be integrated, with forum link in header
bar, there needs to be a universal login, possibly front page which can put
you in the forums without a need to login again to access forums.
PHPBB is a pain in this regard for integration but there are scripts that
bridge this divide. Would do well to have a seamless single user login for
all areas of website - modules, announcements, forums, custom etc…
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The other half (being web design) is now opining These aren’t my words!
She finds the 2 column / 3 column split funky.
Also while it works in FF there is an alignment problem with the 3 column in
IE
She also thinks its weird that latest news is at the bottom, at 1208 X 1024
already requires user scrolling to see the news. Her thoughts are Latest
news is prominent, pertinent information for users but should pop out
immediately without scroll, but this does conflict with standard unchanging
info.
Her thoughts are you already have to scroll therefore:
Content 1 side, News other. Possiibly resized as needed ( content wider,
news narrower etc…
I shouldn’t have shown her…
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