More about the new theme.
I'm sure a lot of people are wondering what all brought this on. Back when I originally built OGA, I was new to Drupal and didn't really know what I was doing, so I ended up making a lot of design mistakes, particularly in the structure of the site. What ended up happening was that OGA was essentially built on a spaghetti code, so changes often had far-reaching and unexpected consequences.
Furthermore, from a theme standpoint, I found the original theme annoyingly limiting -- for instance, the sidebar on the right was too narrow, and wasn't very good for conveying information. Also, the site title was way bigger than it needed to be, and wasted a lot of space. Plus, the menus were starting to get out of control.
At any rate, this move represents the jump from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. I've been spending the last several months writing about 2,000 lines of migration code, which reorganized the site into something a bit easier for me to work with and expand on under the hood. While OGA 2.0 isn't anywhere near done yet, this at least opens up the possibility of building it easily, so it should speed up the development process a lot (plus, I'll be able to add things incrementally now instead of dumping all the features on everyone all at once).
For now, I've added a couple of new goodies:
- User profile pictures
- Forum searching
- Gold medals now replace silver medals, which replace bronze medals (although you can view all of your medals on your profile page)
The rest of the OGA 2 features (including art collections, which is the big one) will appear as they're finished.
Comments
And I need to fix the comment bug. :p
"User profile pictures"
/me starts browsing through the OGA art to make a nice profile picture :D
Seems like the "views" in the forums aren't counted. They all display "0".
And the "New forum topics" block isn't updated (I just posted a new topic and it isn't in there).
It annoys me that I can't click on the topic title of your blog posts to see comments, and instead have to click on "Add new comment" just to read them.
Hi bart,
Please provide a colour scheme (at least as an option) with primarily dark (ideally black) text on a light background.
The current colours (light gray on dull blue) are extremely difficult to read. I'd hate to have to disable styles on this site :(
Cheers,
Can't login to my account to appreciate the new theme... :(
I can't help you if you don't tell me your account name. :)
Hrm... I came across a very weird bug; it seems I've been awarded ALL the medals. I think now I even outrank you, eh?
P.S. You don't have to fix this if you don't want! ;-)
Hmm... somehow I have horizontal scrolling on this page.
Hi there,
I really like the new style of the pages and am getting used to navigating around,
Just like to ask, on the old site there was an area called "my watched posts" where you could check for any new posts on submitted items. I can't seem to find anything similar and I don't know how to check for comments on uploads etc (has this gone or am I just not looking in the right place?)
also when I go to the openID tab some of the writing seems to be overlapping and means you can't change to a different tab:
http://i1089.photobucket.com/albums/i356/Scribe123/Open%20Game%20Art/ope...
OK, a couple of notes so far from browsing:
If it would be possible to have customizable color schemes, that would be cool. I tend to prefer light themes over dark ones for viewing art (not knocking the current one at all, it's just a personal preference).
When I click on a preview image while viewing a piece of art, it acts as a link back to that piece. I don't know why I had the urge to click them in the first place, but yeah.
This is almost certainly known, but each piece seems to have been trimmed to one preview, and said single preview is deanimated if it had animation even when viewed on its own page. The preview size also seems to have been enlarged for browsing--just resizing previews with interpolation to fit the box works for some pieces, but it's a bit problematic for pixel art. Having a border around would probably look better.
Sorry if I'm just repeating stuff that's already known!
Ka-testing the edit function!
Another couple of bugs:
* All topics have 'Last post' displayed date time 'Sat, 07/09/2011 - 07:44'
* Urls mapping for subforums was changed, for example link to FLARE subforum was http://opengameart.org/forums/projects/flare and now it is http://opengameart.org/forums/flare , so such old links did not work
Both probably known issues, but I don't see where they are stated and as far as I understood it is a good place to post bugs, so I post them here.
I would like the following
Edit:
And one quote (from Einstein): "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler"
Damn, I kinda liked the "Latest 2D Art", "Latest 3D Art" sections. People coming to the site will have different requirements for art and its best to set them immediately in the right direction.
Also no "Featured Art"? It's best to put your best foot foward so you can instantly impress newcomers, and there may be great but eventually forgotten pices of art that require attention.
I'm sorry I'm being critical here, but when it comes to websites I have functionality more in mind than aesthetics, and I feel the front page could be doing more for showing off what's on display then just showing the most recenlty submitted pieces.
I'm sorry I'm being critical here, but when it comes to websites I have functionality more in mind than aesthetics, and I feel the front page could be doing more for showing off what's on display then just showing the most recenlty submitted pieces.
This theme is the first step toward OGA2, and it's a jump that I had to make in order to be able to continue building features. What that means is that unfortunately we're dealing with a temporary step backward in terms of functionality. I don't mean to take that stuff away -- I know people liked it. What I'm planning to do is add custom art collections, and also allow people to customize the blocks that they put on their own start page, so you can start with the same information that was on the original OGA. Once I get art collections finished, I'll be able to re-create the Featured Art section, but as a collection (which will be a feature available to everyone) instead of just something that I put together. Featured Art is going to be replaced by a collection of the OGA staff's making called Staff Picks. You'll be able to build collections of your own also.
Your criticisms are valid, but you should be aware that we're already planning on addressing them. :)
Could you please fix the links ASAP? I'm worried about my project disappearing from Google searches.