If the number of news columns is a multiple of 2, then the gutter between
the upper columns is aligned with one of the gutters between the news
columns. Four news columns makes the news columns too narrow anyway; with
two news columns, gutter alignment makes it apear that the news heading
is in the left column, and then there’s some similar looking but unrelated
stuff in the right column. There needs to be something which makes it clear
that the upper columns stop when the news starts, and in this case it’s
the middle column spanning the upper column gutter.
I guess it would be possible to make the news be two-column, but have a
rule between the bottom of the upper part of the page and the lower.
My laptop runs at 1280x1024, and I see all of the news except the bottom
half of the entry for January 25. Larger fonts?
What I’m wondering is how important it is to have the news entirely “above
the fold”. My idea was that the upper parts of the page are for people new
to VASSAL. The front page is the page they’re likely to come to first, and
the news is too inside baseball for people who are new—it won’t mean
anything to them until they’ve used VASSAL a bit. I think the new user has
two questions—what is VASSAL? and how do I get it? Seeing the news higher
up the page will only be confusing for new users, I suspect.
My guess is that anyone who wants the news will know where to look for it
(or use the RSS feed). Looking around at some other sites which don’t have
sidebars, I see that putting the news toward the bottom is pretty popular.
We could get the news higher up the page if we had less text above it…
Is the copy I wrote too wordy?
What I’d been planning to do is use LDAP authentication for the forum,
wiki, and bug tracker, which would mean that you’d have the same account
across all three, but you’d still have to log in for each one. (Since I
have Firefox save all of my account information, I barely notice having
to log in anywhere anymore…)
Just a general preference for grids and a desire to avoid having
visual elements that look like they are almost aligned. This will
sometimes happen by accident when no alignment is intended, but it can
be confusing to the viewer, because they aren’t sure if there should
be alignment, but we missed by a bit, or if there isn’t any such
alignment.
That’s why I figured it was a bit premature to comment on that aspect
just yet.
Looks good! Nav bar is clear. Downloads well highlighted. I like the “Get VASSAL” “Get Help” “Get Involved” theme. Maybe use “Get Games” instead of “What Games Are There?”
VASSAL is properly capitalized, but the logo at top has it in all lowercase.
Even on Firefox, all the words in the navigation bar are clustered together, with about 1/3 of the bar blank after “Help”
In general, I find the text too verbose. For example “What Games Are There” could read simply
Choose from hundreds of games in our module library. Or use the editor to build your own.
Similarly for “Get Involved”
I would not embed any YouTube clips on the main page. However, it would be great to have some in the documentation/introduction section.
The reason for this is that it looks awful completely uppercased.
That’s intentional. There will be more entries in the nav bar when you
go to the wiki, so if they were spread out on the main page, you’d see
the nav bar entries move when you went to the wiki (or the forum), which
would be Bad.
Surely there must be some way to make it look good and be consistent with the usage on the rest of the page.
Ways around this would be to have a secondary nav bar under the first, or to put disabled entries in the primary nav bar.
I agree with Tim that they never look consistent with the rest of the page design. Unless a video is being watched, it’s an ugly distraction. Few people will watch it more than once, so it detracts from the page for most users most of the time. A video would be appropriate in the “Learn More” section.
It wasn’t fonts - its our browser toolbars that is causing the page to push
further down. We only see the top line of the first 3 items In News Section.
She says hi, but declines on trying to do something else. Says she’s got too
many pages working on already and wont have time to get to it anytime soon
I tried to use all caps, but found that (1) it looks too heavy that way,
and (2) it’s very difficult to get the subtitle both be a readable size
and be the same lenght as “VASSAL” when you use all caps, as well as not
exceding 72px in height.
I’ll put the source SVG into the repository tomorrow. You’re welcome to
try creating something better, but I spent a few hours at it and concluded
that it wasn’t going to work with all caps.
There’s already a secondary nav bar under the first for the wiki, and there
will probably be one for the forum as well. The extra entries for the wiki
really, really don’t belong in the secondary nav bar, as the secondary nav
bar has to do with page editing and these have to do with account management
and wiki navigation.
As for disabled entries, I think there would end up being more disabled
entries from the forum, wiki, and bug tracker together than would fit in the
nav bar.
So, if we find a video player which does look consistent with the rest of
the design, then you wouldn’t object? I think you could say the same for
screenshots—they won’t be viewed more than once either, but a video has
a lot more “wow” to it than screenshots.
I think I’ll make a less wordy version of the page, and then maybe we can
devise some kind of usability test to determine which is more effective
for new users? I hate not having any way to quantify decisions like this.
Surely there must be some way to make it look good and be consistent with the usage on the rest of the page.
Ways around this would be to have a secondary nav bar under the first, or to put disabled entries in the primary nav bar.
I agree with Tim that they never look consistent with the rest of the page design. Unless a video is being watched, it’s an ugly distraction. Few people will watch it more than once, so it detracts from the page for most users most of the time. A video would be appropriate in the “Learn More” section.
I think this is aimed at someone who has phpBB and a non-phpBB front page,
and wants to let users login to phpBB from the front page, not at someone
who is trying to get two systems to use the same user database.
That won’t help with what we want, since showing the phpBB login in
MediaWiki is kind of useless if it doesn’t also log you into MediaWiki.
Nice try, though.
Anyway, I fought an epic battle with OpenLDAP this evening and now MediaWiki
authenticates users against the LDAP server. The hard part was getting the
worker account to have the right permissions—now that I have that, it
should be easy to get phpBB and Bugzilla to use LDAP.
I have a working unified login now. MediaWiki and Bugzilla both expose
scripts with well-documented APIs so that you can do things like get login
cookies (and also write bots, etc.). phpBB, like usual, seems to exist in
it’s own world where there is no other software with which to interoperate,
and so I had to resort to an ugly hack in order to snag the login cookies.
I cannot believe that in 2009 I had to bother with this at all—there
should be a single-signon server which all web services support, and it
should have existed for something like five years by now.
I have some cleanup to do with this before anyone else tries it, but the
hard part—figuring out how to get the cookies—is done now. What’s left
to do is hookup all of the logout links (so we have single-signout),
redirect all of the login links in the forum, bug tracker, and wiki to the
sign-in form, and write an account creation form.
Everything to which there is a link should work (creating an account,
resetting a forgotten password, logging in). The one thing which you
can’t do yet is change your password, real name, or email address.
