Reviews 'beta' site

[Morrus]

The new reviews/d20 guide is now at a stage where we can have a look at it.

Please note:

1) It is NOT finished yet. Far from it.

2) The data in there is old - it's just test data. The review don#'t match the products at present. That doesn't matter right now.

3) The right hand column will be moving to the left. All of the tabs in the right hand column will be merged with the tabs on the left (so it will read: Most Recent Reviews|Top 10 Wizards|Top 10 d20|Worst 10 d20 | Reviewers|Search|Admin).

4) The search function will be expanded. At present it searched for words in the title of each product only. It'll cover the descriptons of the products too - so you can search for products dealing with the 'sea', for example.

5) The 'browse product' function will indicate whether a productis available, out of print, overdue, announced etc.

There's more to do too. But feel free to take a look, offer suggestions. Remember this is very much 'in development'.

 

[Morrus]

Oh - it would probably help if I posted a link:

http://www.enworld.org:8888/

 

[Psionicist]

Morrus, this absolutely ROCKS! I'm glad you found a techie to do the coding stuff, I mean, you cannot do everything yourself on a community this big! Things were much better when you just had to concentrate on D&D / d20 than annoying servers, coding and other spooky stuff.

Way to go!

 

[EricNoah]

Using IE 5.5, it has some very weird problems. The center panel has a scrollbar, but the overall page itself has no scroll bar. There's material farther down the page but I can't get to it. I'm finding that I can resize the side panels (is that intentional?)

I'll see how IE 6 works when I get home.

 

[Chacal]

It looks very nice, I really like the new layout.
It loads faster too, but I don't know if it comes more from the size of the test database than from the page size.

A strange thing happened with the review rating checkboxes: I can check lots of them, but not uncheck them.
I get this error when I tried to add a comment:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e09'

[MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver][mysqld-3.23.47-nt]You have an error in your SQL syntax near ')' at line 1

/includes/db.asp, line 37


I'm using Mozilla 0.9.5 under Linux with javascript enabled.


I like the browse by publisher list.

Another strange thing is that the review of Necromancy: Beyond the grave by Psion is not linked from the Mongoose entry. I assume it's because of the test database but I say it just in case...

Hope this helps.


Chacal

 

[Clint]

Really nice start! I really dig the streamlined interface. Fast loading, too.

Clicking on "Top Reviewers" to get to "Browse Reviewers" is a little confusing.

Is loading the list of publishers to start a search necessary? Why not have it broken out to a link? In fact, having all the Browse functionality spread out on the left could be fixed by making a small unit module (grey box) just for Browsing:

Browse: Products | Publishers | Reviewers

Finally, the red scroll bars are a little strong, compared to the color layout of the rest of the page.

Thanks, good luck!

 

[Clint]

Oh, one more comment:

I think that the "most recent reviews" are simply the 10 most recent reviews. There have occasionally been spurts of activity that push a review from as recently as yesterday off the list.

Why not have that be a three or four-day window, instead of the last 10? Then you don't miss a beat, and the window gets smaller in times of inactivity.

Thanks again,

-Clint

 

[trancejeremy]

On the main page, I'd like to be able to pick a publisher from something like a combo-box (that's what they are called in VB, anyway, but the things like on the message board, where you pick the size, color, and font of the text), then go to that companies products.

Kinda like how it's done in the current review page, only instead of all the publishers spread out, they'd just be choices in a combo box.

Many times when I want to submit a review for an item, I need to check to see if it's been added to the database or not. So being able to quickly check the publisher is very useful. At least for me.

Another thing - on the most recent reviews, it might be nice to have spell out the month, ie, May 20 or Feb 10, as opposed to using numbers. Since the US and the rest of the world use different formats, it can be confusing.

 

[omedon]

I really like being able to cycle through the top 10's, the cyling in the reviewers secition is good too, so is searching by company.

My biggest complaint is having the actual reviews sandwiched between two frames but it sounds like you are going to fix this by moving everything to the left menubar, a good move IMHO.

I am not a frames fan, but when everthing is moved to the one side I think it will be much better, and the frames are a small price to pay for the new functions.

I can't wait to see the new changes. Keep up the good work.

 

[Blacksad]

Using IE 5.5, it has some very weird problems. The center panel has a scrollbar, but the overall page itself has no scroll bar. There's material farther down the page but I can't get to it. I'm finding that I can resize the side panels (is that intentional?)

I'll see how IE 6 works when I get home.

Same problem here, but with IE 6