Front Page

I agree with Wil, and, I think it needs bunnies too.  You can use my bunny.  <3

Just throwing my two cents in to say: yup.

Agreed on all points.

Scruffy agrees.

This has been on my todo list for some time (involving Panels). I don't have the time to do it right now, however, since I have family stuff over the holidays and resume university courses in half a week.

Regarding the examples of other websites: having corporate backing with a large budget and full time web design, software engineering, and server administrative staff gives a bit of an advantage.

Regarding the examples of other websites: having corporate backing with a large budget and full time web design, software engineering, and server administrative staff gives a bit of an advantage.

I don't understand what this has to do with making a landing page that's content-heavy, which is the desire that spurred the suggestion & the support thereof.

I don't understand what this has to do with making a landing page that's content-heavy, which is the desire that spurred the suggestion & the support thereof.

The comparison gave me the initial impression of "here are six websites better designed than WrA.net", rather than "the layout could be improved in these ways". That, in hindsight (and with the additional responses), does not seem to have not been the intent -- though I believe I would have been less likely to have that impression with a more limited number of examples or simply a mockup of what would be seen as an improvement.

I apologize for the remark. I'm currently under a bit of unrelated stress, and trying to handle most of the technical and design (the latter of which is not my strong suit) side here can be somewhat overwhelming on a good day.

On that note, if people have specific items that would be useful to see on the front page or specific ideas about the layout (see Panels), go for it. The less I have to try and do designing/thinking when actually implementing it (which will be after the archive site and the, ugh, spoiler-CKeditor integrating JavaScript code), the better.

After looking around at Drupal, I think I've spotted an easier solution. I'm not the most familiar with drupal but I am very familiar with forum websites and have messed around with a lot of different code.

I believe this wasn't originally brought up by people (not speaking for anyone at all, just some people who use the site) because they were under the impression that wranet was always coded completely from scratch, and as anyone can imagine, that's an incredible amount of work. I know you've done a lot of hard work yourself so this shouldn't really interfere with the things you've set up here. 

After browsing the layouts, I saw that WrAnet was pretty much using CorporateClean? This could be wrong but I'd love to get a confirmation on this. http://drupal.org/node/1371250

What everyone here is saying is not that the front page needs panels, instead, people are suggesting we have a side bar like the last layout. There are themes Drupal has that use sidebar layouts. Admittedly, I do not know which theme versions are compatible with this site (I don't know our specs) but I'm guessing there has to be one that also works. I know that the CorporateClean isn't the exact same thing as what's installed (our tabs look more like tabs and have moz-radius borders -- I know that's not the proper term probably, but that's the CSS term), but I'm assuming that color changes are less finnicky than other forums -- meaning, you don't have to plug in every single color code change throughout the layout's code. Is there a color wheel for this ala tumblr's layout designs? Does it stay or change when code is installed? 

The point about the content being on the bottom could be remedied by having a sidebar where all that information is put. That way the mods can continue their front page layout and we don't have to worry about coding panels at the moment.

Themes like Zen: http://drupal.org/project/zen for example support sidebars. I found more examples of layouts for Drupal through this link, though many of them are far too flashy and look like personal blogs than website layouts. http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/hand-picked-beautiful-drupal-6-themes/

So what I'm getting at is, coding a sidebar seems like it'd be out of the question anyway because what we have is apart of a layout. So instead of going through a complete ordeal to try to code a sidebar and trying to code panels -- which really only solves half the problem at the moment, why not change the layout? 

better example of zen's standard layout: http://drupal.org/node/412672

Honestly I never noticed the stuff on the bottom of the site.

Like, I really didn't know it was there, and I'm not terribly unobservant. 

Maybe indicative of something that should change?

A quick preface to this post (written after the rest of it, for some extra context): I'm not a design guy. I'm not great at web design, layout, or anything artistic. I can manage, but it is not my strong suit -- meaning any design changes and modifications take me significantly longer to make than it would someone who actually specializes in it. In general, they, also, have just as good a chance of being terrible as they do of being good when they're finally finished (which means more work to make them good -- or discarding them entirely as bad). Anyway, on to the actual post

Changing the theme entirely is significantly more work than using Panels (a module that allows a comparatively simple creation/arrangement of layouts for specific pages -- it's not a site-wide layout tool, mind) to create a more useful front page. Building a new theme from the ground up is an incredibly huge amount of work -- even using something like Zen requires writing essentially all the CSS from scratch, as it contains no design CSS and very minimal layout CSS, intended only as a starting point for creating a custom theme without having to write the entire thing from scratch.

Currently the theme WrA.net uses is based on Bartik (the Drupal 7 default theme -- this was done to actually have a WrA.net relaunch sometime this century), with a number of customizations done in a subtheme (mostly CSS changes for colours, but also some template changes). There are a significant number of limitations on using the Color module (the one that can provide a 'color picker' interface for certain elements) that makes it not terribly useful for WrA.net, most notably a lack of support in the other modules we're using (such as Advanced Forum, Calendar, and similar) -- as we would still require tweaks it cannot do, all colour changes are instead just done through CSS in the wranet subtheme. This isn't really an issue for ease of maintenance at all -- it just means it takes a few moments of digging in Firebug to find the correct definition to override.

What everyone here is saying is not that the front page needs panels, instead, people are suggesting we have a side bar like the last layout.

I don't see where you're seeing that in this thread. I actually don't see any mention of sidebars until you brought them up. Nor mentions of redoing the entire theme -- just of the front page.

That said, the theme currently being used does have the capability to display sidebars, but they aren't exceptionally pretty (they are currently used on user pages to link to character sheets, etc. for an example). Further, making excessive use of sidebars squishes content into a really thin column, so I'm not especially keen on using them on every page -- my opinion is it is more useful for the actual page content to use as much of the horizontal space as possible, given that horizontal space is more of a limiting factor than vertical space.

I believe this wasn't originally brought up by people (not speaking for anyone at all, just some people who use the site) because they were under the impression that wranet was always coded completely from scratch, and as anyone can imagine, that's an incredible amount of work.

There is still a decent amount of customization that goes into anything used (whether by administrative options, theme/code tweaks, or both). Drupal is essentially a framework for building a site without having to do all the code from scratch. The wranet subtheme I linked earlier is a good idea of the minimum of customization that would need to go into any major theme/design changes (the minimum -- some things I configured around Bartik's layout/design, and a lot of modules base their defaults on Bartik as well, which may need more changes to work with certain other base themes), and most of them would not be able to be directly applied to a new theme, only acting as a pointer for what I'd need to tweak. (As an aside, that subtheme is not anywhere near the entirety of the technical work is done to keep WrA.net running smoothly -- just the majority of the design/layout, which probably gives an indication of how much that is not my forte.)

In summary... It wouldn't be impossible to change base themes, but I don't believe it would be a good use of my time. It would take a couple weeks of work at least (given the limited time I have to spend on it) to only reach the point of everything working the way it does with the current theme. Unless I'm entirely missing... something in this thread, my understanding is that the request is to have the front page have more things on it, and in an easy-to-navigate way.

If that is not something you are willing to implement, then, by all means, I'll just default my bookmarks to blogs and avoid the front page entirely as it seems to have little use apart for minor announcements for now.

There's an entirely unfinished, very basic version of what I already said I was intending to do when time permitted. Now please note that my last post, which seemed to have irritated you so, was discussing the comments that suggested redoing the entire site-wide theme was what this thread was about. Indeed, I noted that I did not believe I was addressing what the thread was about, only Viensa's post which was discussing the site's layout and theme in its entirety.

As noted on the new front page, it's entirely incomplete and is a sadly rudimentary version of what I intended to spend more time perfecting, but I hope it will be useful enough for now. I'll have to do that inbetween setting up the old-WrA.net archive, finishing catching up on unrelated responsibilities I neglected when doing the push to relaunch WrA.net, keeping on top of my coursework, spending the remainder of the holidays around my family, and maybe getting a bit more time to play Skyward Sword, hopefully. But I believe what is there now mostly fits the clamouring for something slightly more useful, at least well enough for this very instant.

I'm rather fond of the current layout, personally- but that's probably because I spend an excessive amount of my time browsing the site through an iPhone and the straight line works well for that. I do agree that the text wall can be a little much, and perhaps it should be set to a monthly cut off to prevent news posts from gathering or set up in columns?

As far as a quick way to check content, hitting the 'End' button sends me right to the good stuff. Then again, I know there's a lot of set ups out there that may not work the same.

I brought up the theme option because I wasn't sure how the actual site worked with layouts, and whether it was a fairly easy install with an easy solution to changing colors, or whether colors were placed specifically through the CSS code (which is what I'm more familiar with, and yeah, I know that the more extensive the code gets, the more of a pain in the ass it becomes). So I gotcha, it's a bit of a mix. I also brought that up as a solution to panels because it didn't seem like you were too keen on implementing the panels (but I could have just read that wrong).

Anyway I brought up the sidebar options because the thing about seeing content quickly has been brought up a lot and that's not just a front page issue. You still have to scroll down very far for other pages to see the updated content. But I can understand if you don't want to change the layout or don't have the time. WrAnet 1.0 operated with sidebars and I brought up the Zen layout only because I figured the layouts were similar, and assumed (at the time) that implementing themes and tweaking them via Drupal was fairly straight forward -- but yeah, mixing CSS in there can make that messy.

Most of my post wasn't suggesting that you must change the theme or any of that -- I was honestly inquiring how Drupal worked overall when formatting a new layout and trying to see what the easier solution was in the long run.

Onto the point -- I think the front page, even unfinished, is looking a lot better already.

Never did I say that revamping the entire layout is necessary, either, just that the text-only and hidden away content really did not do the website justice.

I didn't think this was the suggestion being made -- I was only addressing the issue because Viensa brought it up. Speaking of...

Most of my post wasn't suggesting that you must change the theme or any of that -- I was honestly inquiring how Drupal worked overall when formatting a new layout and trying to see what the easier solution was in the long run.

Hopefully my description was, er, descriptive enough. If you want more information, I can try to answer specific questions. (Regarding Zen specifically: it is lovely, but even just writing 30KB of CSS is really painful for me. I've tried, and I can't make it look good from scratch.)

To make an offtopic note along these lines, though, I do have plans for 'theme' related things (specifically relating to a wider variety of colour schemes and some quality-of-life changes for me in managing said colour schemes), but, again, it's something that'll be done when I've got several more important things out of the way (biggest being the archive site). And also when I'm convinced that everything is more or less setup how it will be nearly FOREVER on the site, so as to not break old colour schemes when new things happen too often. So this won't be for a while. Pre-Mists hopefully, given the current Cataclysmic colours.

set up in columns

*taps the front page* This, as semi-demonstrated, will be one of the things being used to arrange stuff that doesn't need as much width.

Things that will/might be on the front page at some point or another (i.e., Soon™):

• Random character page (either a continuation of what Fulbreth started with the 'featured' style, or literal random).
• Featured other sorts of pages (perhaps featured forum threads, if there are interesting discussions often enough).
• Better way of dealing with announcements. (Possibly something like: teaser text of most recent, list of five other most recent announcements by title.)
• More useful links deeper into the site (i.e., direct links to jump to, say, Art Gallery or new/updated blog posts).
• Hell if I know. There's a lot of stuff that's possible ('almost anything', if someone agrees to manually manage it -- a little more limited if either I have to manage it or if it's all automated), but I'm not great at thinking of what. So someone think of some stuff you want, so I don't have to.

Hopefully my description was, er, descriptive enough. If you want more information, I can try to answer specific questions. (Regarding Zen specifically: it is lovely, but even just writing 30KB of CSS is really painful for me. I've tried, and I can't make it look good from scratch.)

Yepyep, I was just clarifying. 

Random character page (either a continuation of what Fulbreth started with the 'featured' style, or literal random).

Just gonna throw in my two cents to say that'd be cool featured as a literal random thing.

Last comment and oh god please don't beat me for being the bringing bad news, but if you weren't aware, with the change of the front page, something altered the blog index listing to show one post per page (at least, that's how it's showing for me)

with the change of the front page, something altered the blog index listing to show one post per page

I forgot one thing was tied to another thing because late night. It's fixed now.

I have to say this - I like the current front page now. 8D Less cluttered.

I haven't looked at the front page in a while, but having mucked around with Drupal and tried to maintain and design a website for a charitable organization for the last 10 years... I applaud you, Itarater.

I know what a pain in the ass all of this is. Thank you. <3

Onto the point -- I think the front page, even unfinished, is looking a lot better already.

This.

Looking good! Thanks for cleaning it up some. :3

I love it, but it still needs a cute bunny somewhere.

I haven't looked at the front page in a while, but having mucked around with Drupal and tried to maintain and design a website for a charitable organization for the last 10 years... I applaud you, Itarater.

I know what a pain in the ass all of this is. Thank you. <3

 

Pretty much this, I did my own coding for websites back in the day, and the amount of time you want to put into a site versus the amount of time you actually have when you factor in school, career, family and what-have-you is a near impossible juggling act. So thank you for all that you do.