[drupal-devel] CivicSpace Labs launches new beta site
Despite the title sounding like a press release, it's true what it says! Neil, Keiran, Ankur, Johnny and I spent literally the last two.5 days pushing through a signficant redesign of civicspacelabs.org (anyone who was in the menus IRC meeting knows how intellectually present I was after being up for 29 hours). In any case, I wanted to invite the Drupal community to come take a look at a site that will hopefully begin to show what's possible with Drupal from a UI/experience perspective. There are plenty of other sites out there that are already pushing the limits of Drupal, but I would like to make an effort to prove (with documentation!) just how powerful and robust Drupal is for designers too... as well as make note of the areas in which Drupal needs vast improvement. So I'm looking for feedback, good ideas and heck, even volunteers who want to help throw some code around. I'm keeping a public log of requests and tasks at: http://factoryjoe.tadalist.com/lists/show/32277 So thanks to everyone who gave preliminary feedback and helped make this BETA launch better. Over the next couple weeks I'll be doing a second iterative redesign... probably moving away from the pastels so don't complain to heavily if they're not in your bag. ;) Chris
Great work! This is really Yet Another Proof of how flexible Drupal is. And I likt the fact its more than a theme, but that the complete structure abnd the theme is a unity. Really great work! Another great job is the way you managed to hide stuff with CSSand replace it with CSS images: Very good downgrading design, Bu, I would not be writing this is there was not an issue... Where is Drupal? Not that i think you must mention it, b I have been at Kintera, GetActive, IStandFor and DemocracyInAction. But still habe never heard of Drupal. Then I have read about ASP, why CS is better and how " has armies of volunteer programmers around the world developing and regularly contributing new functionality to the platform.". But still no word on drupal, its developers or its community. TAke for eample Bryght: Drupal is the fourth highlighted item. I know its not a requirement, nor is it a real hard issue. But I beleive we should give eachother credit. You are using Drupal, Drupal used CS. Why hide it so far away? Why not tell em right away that CS is a Drupal Altered For You (r)? Bèr Op vrijdag 11 maart 2005 22:17, schreef Chris Messina:
Despite the title sounding like a press release, it's true what it says! Neil, Keiran, Ankur, Johnny and I spent literally the last two.5 days pushing through a signficant redesign of civicspacelabs.org (anyone who was in the menus IRC meeting knows how intellectually present I was after being up for 29 hours).
In any case, I wanted to invite the Drupal community to come take a look at a site that will hopefully begin to show what's possible with Drupal from a UI/experience perspective. There are plenty of other sites out there that are already pushing the limits of Drupal, but I would like to make an effort to prove (with documentation!) just how powerful and robust Drupal is for designers too... as well as make note of the areas in which Drupal needs vast improvement.
So I'm looking for feedback, good ideas and heck, even volunteers who want to help throw some code around.
I'm keeping a public log of requests and tasks at: http://factoryjoe.tadalist.com/lists/show/32277
So thanks to everyone who gave preliminary feedback and helped make this BETA launch better. Over the next couple weeks I'll be doing a second iterative redesign... probably moving away from the pastels so don't complain to heavily if they're not in your bag. ;)
Chris Regards, Bèr -- [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]
Thanks Ber, Great feedback and an excellent point. One of the problems with the look of finality on the site is that it betrays how "beta" it really is. That Drupal isn't more prominent is certainly something that will change... and in a big way -- and is something that I have already planned for. Already we're drawing critical bugs from Drupal's project tracker on the developer's page. We will be doing more things like that soon -- hopefully integrating Drupal blogs and whatnot into our sidebars. Here's something I should mention now that I talked about briefly in IRC... CivicSpace is considering moving its development/coding to drupal.org and focusing on our advocacy community and documentation on csl.org. That means that we would get/give more help from the drupal community, become more integrated and ultimately just "package functionality" on top of drupal. So we would become much more of an actual drupal distro than our own rogue project. I think that would also allow us to ship modules separately, rather than forcing monolithic downloads... thoughts on this would be welcome. Also, we're reworking our "product" as well as our "messaging"... so don't feel slighted that on this first go around drupal isn't more prominent. We need to think about how to best promote you on our site before lavishing praise all over you! Anyway, keep the feedback coming -- I really appreciate it. Chris On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 23:56:48 +0100, Bèr Kessels <berdrupal@tiscali.be> wrote:
Great work!
This is really Yet Another Proof of how flexible Drupal is. And I likt the fact its more than a theme, but that the complete structure abnd the theme is a unity. Really great work! Another great job is the way you managed to hide stuff with CSSand replace it with CSS images: Very good downgrading design,
Bu, I would not be writing this is there was not an issue... Where is Drupal? Not that i think you must mention it, b I have been at Kintera, GetActive, IStandFor and DemocracyInAction. But still habe never heard of Drupal. Then I have read about ASP, why CS is better and how " has armies of volunteer programmers around the world developing and regularly contributing new functionality to the platform.". But still no word on drupal, its developers or its community.
TAke for eample Bryght: Drupal is the fourth highlighted item.
I know its not a requirement, nor is it a real hard issue. But I beleive we should give eachother credit. You are using Drupal, Drupal used CS. Why hide it so far away? Why not tell em right away that CS is a Drupal Altered For You (r)?
Bèr
On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 06:50:32PM -0800, Chris Messina wrote:
Here's something I should mention now that I talked about briefly in IRC... CivicSpace is considering moving its development/coding to drupal.org and focusing on our advocacy community and documentation on csl.org. That means that we would get/give more help from the drupal community, become more integrated and ultimately just "package functionality" on top of drupal. So we would become much more of an actual drupal distro than our own rogue project. I think that would also allow us to ship modules separately, rather than forcing monolithic downloads... thoughts on this would be welcome.
It should be noted that this is at this point an idea which has been tossed around at a meeting or two and is not being implemented quite yet. The details of how this move is implemented are still being worked out.
Visually nice, I like the CSS rollover solution for the top links - its actually accessible (vs. similar effects I have seen being used). My only comment would be to pear down your CSS file. It could likely be peared down by 20-25K without loosing any styling. Trust CSS inheritance and precedence. I haven't played around with the site yet to comment on functionality or ease of finding information, but my initial sense is that it will take some getting used to. andre p.s. Oh yeah - and mention Drupal a bit more. . Chris Messina wrote:
Despite the title sounding like a press release, it's true what it says! Neil, Keiran, Ankur, Johnny and I spent literally the last two.5 days pushing through a signficant redesign of civicspacelabs.org (anyone who was in the menus IRC meeting knows how intellectually present I was after being up for 29 hours).
In any case, I wanted to invite the Drupal community to come take a look at a site that will hopefully begin to show what's possible with Drupal from a UI/experience perspective. There are plenty of other sites out there that are already pushing the limits of Drupal, but I would like to make an effort to prove (with documentation!) just how powerful and robust Drupal is for designers too... as well as make note of the areas in which Drupal needs vast improvement.
So I'm looking for feedback, good ideas and heck, even volunteers who want to help throw some code around.
I'm keeping a public log of requests and tasks at: http://factoryjoe.tadalist.com/lists/show/32277
So thanks to everyone who gave preliminary feedback and helped make this BETA launch better. Over the next couple weeks I'll be doing a second iterative redesign... probably moving away from the pastels so don't complain to heavily if they're not in your bag. ;)
Chris
Thanks Andre. Great points. And I do think I can pair down my CSS considerably, but trusting in inheritance on Drupal is no easy task. Maybe it's because I don't have a way of gauging where all of the HTML output comes from or because the way I've modified the themeable functions makes it hard to keep things consistent or because Drupal's XHTML isn't what I'm looking for, but a great deal of those styles are necessary. I should also point out that I consolidated just about everything except for layout into styles.css, whereas I had previously been using 3-5 stylesheets (coupled with those provided by modules). My CSS is certainly not as tight as I'd like it to be yet, but I think part of it is running up against some of those areas I mentioned in Drupal that need some work (making the menu module use consistent classing next to the local tasks XHTML would be one example). In any case, I was truly impressed by how much I could do w/ Drupal once I was forced into a room for ~48 hours with Neil to build a website. We might end up adopting this approach for everything we do from now on (though perhaps at not such a frantic pace). So thanks again for your feedback and let me know if you find anything else once you've played around a bit more! Chris On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 19:41:05 -0500, Andre Molnar <mcsparkerton@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Visually nice,
I like the CSS rollover solution for the top links - its actually accessible (vs. similar effects I have seen being used).
My only comment would be to pear down your CSS file. It could likely be peared down by 20-25K without loosing any styling.
Trust CSS inheritance and precedence.
I haven't played around with the site yet to comment on functionality or ease of finding information, but my initial sense is that it will take some getting used to.
andre
p.s. Oh yeah - and mention Drupal a bit more. . Chris Messina wrote:
Despite the title sounding like a press release, it's true what it says! Neil, Keiran, Ankur, Johnny and I spent literally the last two.5 days pushing through a signficant redesign of civicspacelabs.org (anyone who was in the menus IRC meeting knows how intellectually present I was after being up for 29 hours).
In any case, I wanted to invite the Drupal community to come take a look at a site that will hopefully begin to show what's possible with Drupal from a UI/experience perspective. There are plenty of other sites out there that are already pushing the limits of Drupal, but I would like to make an effort to prove (with documentation!) just how powerful and robust Drupal is for designers too... as well as make note of the areas in which Drupal needs vast improvement.
So I'm looking for feedback, good ideas and heck, even volunteers who want to help throw some code around.
I'm keeping a public log of requests and tasks at: http://factoryjoe.tadalist.com/lists/show/32277
So thanks to everyone who gave preliminary feedback and helped make this BETA launch better. Over the next couple weeks I'll be doing a second iterative redesign... probably moving away from the pastels so don't complain to heavily if they're not in your bag. ;)
Chris
On Friday 11 March 2005 22:17, Chris Messina wrote:
So I'm looking for feedback
Ok, it looks a lot better than the previous version, and it stands-out nicely from other sites. Looks a bit like what Applelabs would look like maybe.... It works well in Lynx, but in firefox with images disabled there is no replacement text for the missing images. It seems to me the text-replacement causes more problems than simply using an image with alt text... Also, when inside a section you are highlighting the button of that section at the top of the page. It would be better if it didn't mouse-over to the non-active version of the image, because it looks like you mixed-up your mouse-overs, and the button of the section you are in should not give the impression of being active. Nice though, Richard
On Saturday 12 March 2005 11:31, Richard Bennett wrote:
So I'm looking for feedback Also, the mouseovers on the front-page work opposite than those on the inside pages. Normally I would expect the front-page rolovers to be 'unactive' by default, and show 'active' when moused-over.
richard.
Thanks for the feedback Richard. The things you pointed out I was mostly aware of -- including the inconsistent rollovers and the hover state for the current section... I'll think some more about that, but I plan on getting rid of the current appearance with someone a little more "poppy" in the coming weeks. The other thing you mentioned about turning off images is something I hadn't really considered. It's a problem for text replacement, for sure, but I wonder how many people browse with images turned off. I certainly know it happens -- I just wonder whether it's worth investing much time in. I'm very interested in any feedback you have about your experience with Linx, since that's kind of a simulation of how a blind person might experience the site (since the text is read out loud) as well as how a search engine would "see" the site. If you were able to get around in it ok, cool! Chris On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 12:07:33 +0100, Richard Bennett <richard.b@gritechnologies.com> wrote:
On Saturday 12 March 2005 11:31, Richard Bennett wrote:
So I'm looking for feedback Also, the mouseovers on the front-page work opposite than those on the inside pages. Normally I would expect the front-page rolovers to be 'unactive' by default, and show 'active' when moused-over.
richard.
A small question: are you using sections.module for the theme swtiching on CS? Bèr Op vrijdag 11 maart 2005 22:17, schreef Chris Messina:
Despite the title sounding like a press release, it's true what it says! Neil, Keiran, Ankur, Johnny and I spent literally the last two.5 days pushing through a signficant redesign of civicspacelabs.org (anyone who was in the menus IRC meeting knows how intellectually present I was after being up for 29 hours).
In any case, I wanted to invite the Drupal community to come take a look at a site that will hopefully begin to show what's possible with Drupal from a UI/experience perspective. There are plenty of other sites out there that are already pushing the limits of Drupal, but I would like to make an effort to prove (with documentation!) just how powerful and robust Drupal is for designers too... as well as make note of the areas in which Drupal needs vast improvement.
So I'm looking for feedback, good ideas and heck, even volunteers who want to help throw some code around.
I'm keeping a public log of requests and tasks at: http://factoryjoe.tadalist.com/lists/show/32277
So thanks to everyone who gave preliminary feedback and helped make this BETA launch better. Over the next couple weeks I'll be doing a second iterative redesign... probably moving away from the pastels so don't complain to heavily if they're not in your bag. ;)
Chris Regards, Bèr -- [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]
Actually, no I'm not. We had to get this done quickly and I totally forgot about it. We should compare notes on how your module works vs. how we achieved the different layouts. What we did was simply change a class on the body tag depending on the path of the current page. Every page still gets the same theme and stylesheet (so that everything is cached). Chris On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 11:33:31 +0100, Bèr Kessels <berdrupal@tiscali.be> wrote:
A small question: are you using sections.module for the theme swtiching on CS?
Bèr
participants (5)
-
Andre Molnar -
Bèr Kessels -
Chris Messina -
neil＠civicspacelabs.org -
Richard Bennett