Design a Front End for the Spring Website.

[SinbadEV]

I thought we were just trying to come up with a nice band-aid front end to make people's first brush with spring less painful... obviously we've moved beyond that at this point... unfortunately I can't be relied on in this context due to my painfully poor attention span but let's see what we need...

First of all... I'm not very good at the scripting side of things so note that I am just blocking stuff out here...
here's a demo of a scaling version of the Splash page

http://sinbadevsspring.googlepages.com/Spring2.html

if I was good at scripting, if the width of the user's browser goes below 1024x768 the extra stuff on the right would skip down below the break as in the original version

http://sinbadevsspring.googlepages.com/Spring.html

Here is an example of it as a forum page (man have I butchered my source material)

http://sinbadevsspring.googlepages.com/Spring3.html

For the wiki I would say a good clean mono-book skin with a Spring Logo-turning into green numbers or something and a springier scheme...

Download Page would be almost like the splash page but replace the blurb about spring with donload instructions and then on the right side over the promo image there would be the different files available instead of promos and at the bottom we would have our current wall'o'text

like this

http://sinbadevsspring.googlepages.com/Spring4.html

note that in the REAL version the images being used as backgrounds would be modified such that they were stretched instead of tiled (using fancy tables or something.)

also note that the fixed at 800x600 version of the page would be the default for browsers not supporting scripting and css or people who are blocking web-scripts.

[AF]

From past experience I can say roflcopters design has the backing of a minority, the minority being the people who have posted in support.

Because no rival of similar quality has made itself publicly known it now has enough inertia to either force itself through by default or totally wreck any rival that comes along leaving us in limbo, regardless of how superior that rival may be.

You may be handed the ultimate spring site on a silver platter tomorrow but it would not be accepted by the community and it would ultimately be nuked by the popular vote you hold so dear.
.

[SinbadEV]

From past experience I can say roflcopters design has the backing of a minority, the minority being the people who have posted in support.

Because no rival of similar quality has made itself publicly known it now has enough inertia to either force itself through by default or totally wreck any rival that comes along leaving us in limbo, regardless of how superior that rival may be.

You may be handed the ultimate spring site on a silver platter tomorrow but it would not be accepted by the community and it would ultimately be nuked by the popular vote you hold so dear.
.

Not necessarily true... I mean, we could all lose interest when nothing happens and when the new site design shows up on a silver platter we all might just forget this thread ever existed...

S'too bad no-one else stepped up with an example...

edit: not sure how they will scale but the two desgnes acctually really go well together.

WellTogether.png

(1.24 MiB) Downloaded 300 times

[Roflcopter]

-

[Argh]

TBH, I was surprised at the results of that combo... is anybody seriously interested in what would happen if I made the colors match RoflCopter's cooler shades? It'd be simple enough to do, and might actually give us the best of both worlds, because coding the lower news stuff should be easy.

And I agree, I do not think that we're all closed-minded here.

I just want to get a design that people actually like. Since mine doesn't seem to be well-liked, meh, why complain? The resulting design has to be something people actually want to see, imo... my personal preferences are irrelevant.

[AF]

Would anyone mind if I side stepped the whole competition and dropped a fully completed functional website in your laps that could be used as is?

[Argh]

That wouldn't be a side-step, it'd be a competition entry, and as such, more than welcome... show us what you've got...

[Warlord Zsinj]

I'll be the party pooper and say that I don't think they work that well together. They just seem unrelated in their design approaches do not match together cohesively. Together I would say they are worse then one or the other individually. And as I said earlier, I prefer roflcopter's design of the two.

I also think it's symptomatic of Spring that as it's a group project, everyone contributes a little and things are often included by merit of the fact that work has been done rather then merit of content (edit: that wasn't directed at anyone in particular) - and sometimes you do get a 'too many chefs' effect, where rather the virtues of collective production need to be abandoned momentarily for the virtues of a single, comprehensive and driven leader-based approach.

The site is really a flagship that needs to be singular, comprehensive and absolutely not bitsy at all. It can't mince words, because, like a billboard, it needs to cement in the visitors mind an impression that has to stay with them in just a few seconds. The only design thus far that has achieved it is roflcopter's, in my opinion, although roflcopter needs to update it to make space for news.

[Sertse]

I'm for the most achievable option.

[FLOZi]

I think they look awful combined.

I like roflcopters.

In a fixed layout.

And I'm on 1680 x 1050 so there is no need to moan about 'wasted space'.

[AF]

At the end of the day the popular vote will go for the consensus which will be driven by how pretty the screenshots are and whether everyone else is saying they're pretty or not.

Photoshop not html and css are the most appropriate tools here.


I'd like to see how these designs stand up to a full mock-up of the website including forums wiki pages and news items in a web browser that the user can go through and actually use.

[rattle]

I think they look awful combined.

I like roflcopters.

In a fixed layout.

And I'm on 1680 x 1050 so there is no need to moan about 'wasted space'.

[SwiftSpear]

At the end of the day the popular vote will go for the consensus which will be driven by how pretty the screenshots are and whether everyone else is saying they're pretty or not.

At the end of the day popular vote will be overridden by developers and admins who really just want a site that does what they want to do above everything else.

Not to indicate that we don't care what the public thinks here... but ultimately, if the choice comes down to between a site that we can implement and a site that we can't implement... it's really not much of a choice.

[Warlord Zsinj]

*points at gnomres mostly coded site*

[Argh]

Well... no, WZ, that's not mostly-coded.

To really work, it needs to use PHP or some other dynamic language, to swap out the pictures and stuff, and hook into a backend, whether today's Wiki, or AF's DokuWiki.

It's a good demo of functionality, though, and I appreciate the time Gnome spent on a community project, unlike some people around here

[Gnomre]

To be honest, I only really didn't go further (the random code for the little mod buttons) because I didn't want to take the time writing a bunch of crap which would just get immediately re-written or worse, unused.

To store the information (at the very least: mod name, url, thumbnail) you'd either have to use a flatfile system with some sort of delimited files, set up a new sql database, or write something to integrate into the wiki or forum. The former two would then require an administration panel written, along with a general submission form for mods (which must be validated by admins/moderators before being displayed in public). I've done a very similar system before, and it wasn't fun and wasn't coded spectacularly well. The latter option is beyond my skill level and could possibly prove more difficult to moderate.

Regardless of which of those three methods are used, I think I'd rather see a slightly more robust yet standardized profile for each mod hosted on this site, something along these lines:


I guess a download link would be fitting too but I don't feel like editing the picture now It'd basically be like a simplified moddb profile, where data layout is the same. In any case, picking the random mods isn't the hard part, it's deciding how to store and moderate their data.

Aside from that, I can't really integrate forum or wiki or screenshot crap into it because I can't be bothered to mess with mysql and php locally to the point that I could install mediawiki and phpbb (fucking gd is fucking installed you stupid fucking webapps, etc) and even if I did I don't have the current themes this site uses or the screenshot app, so I'd just spend all my time configuring that crap and getting it running and replicating work. It'd be much faster if I could edit the forum and wiki skins myself (non-live copied versions after backups of course) because the current layout is quite similar to Roflcopter's in basic content layout. I did the same thing at TAU and supcomu so the only new experience would be that I had a competent design to build in the first place, since TAU and supcomu are evidence of my suckitude at art and creativity

Long story short: I don't have the stuff I need to take it past a one-page demo, nor the inclination or time to replicate it so I can take it further, but if anyone else wants to I don't give a damn.

[PicassoCT]

Sinbads FrankensteinCombination of both Concept is hot - just needs Colour fixing ..

[Argh]

To be honest, I only really didn't go further (the random code for the little mod buttons) because I didn't want to take the time writing a bunch of crap which would just get immediately re-written or worse, unused.

I'm with you on that. Let's see what AF's going to say about integration into his DokuWiki thing... it looks promising, but I don't really think that it's time to spend that time yet, until he's had time to adjust a few things and make it a little more like what we wanted in the first place.

Sinbads FrankensteinCombination of both Concept is hot - just needs Colour fixing ..

If anybody seriously wants to mess with it, I have the Photoshop file with all of the layers intact, etc., etc. I don't have time right now, P.U.R.E. is getting closer and closer to the beta stage, I cannot spend more time on this project.

[AF]

I would say it is you who should pander to me, not me pandering to you.

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