Redesigning and re-branding EN World

[Valdier]

Can you share the code so I can look at it?

Sure, it isn't in the best of shape right now, I am waiting for permission from Sword and Sorcery to include their books, when they do, I plan to do a big rewrite of it to make it much easier to maintain and to remove 90% of the redundancy that is currently in the "include" jsp pages. So forgive me for the ugliness of the source, I never expected anyone else to see it and hadn't cleaned it up

http://www.valdier.com/backup/monsterShopper/src.zip

 

[Krug]

Re: Reducing the news to links is good

Morrus is not happy with the thought that his site is considered a "news" site.

I'd certainly like to see new reviews on a sidebar on the main page. To see if there are any I have to click on reviews first.

 

[Mistwell]

Conaill, good points

Mistwell: I don't think Morrus wants to be in a position to write full-page news on a regular basis. If he were to do so, I agree he should just have headlines and highlights on the front page.

However, most of the news on the front page is only headlines and highlights. A couple of rumors here, a new release there, some quotes from insiders, etc. Giving those all their own page would be silly, and I think the ENworld community much prefers the condensed, daily updates anyway.

In those few cases where there is a significant "chunk" of news, as in the case of Ryan Dancey's comments, or even in the case of Morrus's own annoucement of the redesign, I do think it would indeed be better just to mention some highlights and then refer to a URL to find out more (possibly posting the full comments on the bulletin boards). For example, here's my summary of Ryan's comments:

Ryan said there are very few restrictions on using Open Game Content, but for the sake of the OGC community, please be "polite" about it. So inform people when you're planning to use their OGC content in your work, and give back to the community by releasing as much of your own original contents under the OGL as well. The full text of Ryan's comments can be found here

Those are all good points. I actually had not thought about those news items that are so short that they don't need a link, nor about the added work for Morrus to make it in the "cleaner" format.

Fair enough.

 

[Valdier]

I got a bit bored last night so I went ahead and put together a mockup taking what I liked from both Morrus and Psionicist's work and put together a sorta "mix" version, I am adding a little more simple of a menu to the top, a non-javascript version(since it doesn't work in mozilla). If you check it and it isn't there give it a little bit and it will be


www.valdier.com/backup/enworld


btw, psionicist, I refreshed that source code since last night, you might wan't to re-download it as some of the files I gave you were bad development files, not what is currently live.

 

[Psionicist]

Yay! We are making progress. We are now two happy geeks working for Morrus and EN World, for twice as good result.

Regarding if you can use PHP, that is easy to fix. You can put the "core", a 5kb big php file on the messageboard server in say, an "enworld" folder, then we can put redirect from the w2k server and use that one for storing all the sections. This is good because you don't need to touch that particular file as there's only and only code in it.

 

[Valdier]

Ok, so I put my menus up top, but as I was going through it, I thought to myself... I really like Psionicists sub-menus, but I am not sure they stand out enough(Draw enough attention to the fact there is now a sub-menu, the other problem being, bandwith usage goes way up, because you have to reload the page each time someone clicks a link...

So I put the menubar at the top of my page, I kinda prefer that one, but I would put Psionicists sub-menu on the bar to the left, but make it an IFRAME so that only the submenu ever has to load. Of course this does mean people will have to use a browser that was released in the last 3 years...

 

[Morrus]

OK, that sounds cool. So what would I need to do, exactly? (Remember - you're talking to an idiot here!)

 

[Valdier]

OK, that sounds cool. So what would I need to do, exactly? (Remember - you're talking to an idiot here!)

The easiest way would be to go with php on the message servers since your server already has it running, but you would have to talk to Psionicist about how his specific schema works for loading colors

I used java for mine, so it would be a slightly larger change needed.

Actually now that I think about it... Psi, you aren't loading the colors from a file each time someone hits the page are you? That could potentially bring the sight to a crawl with how slow disk access is... does php have a persistant method of storing that in memory like javas servlets?

 

[Psionicist]

The easiest way would be to go with php on the message servers since your server already has it running, but you would have to talk to Psionicist about how his specific schema works for loading colors

I used java for mine, so it would be a slightly larger change needed.

Actually now that I think about it... Psi, you aren't loading the colors from a file each time someone hits the page are you? That could potentially bring the sight to a crawl with how slow disk access is... does php have a persistant method of storing that in memory like javas servlets?

Yes, they are stored in files, however (and note however) it only reads from the file once, and it's only some bytes to read. Conclusion: Not a problem

 

[CRGreathouse]

Valdier - I wouldn't worry about the preference files slowing down performance - they're too small to make that large of a change. To agree with Psi: Not a problem.