Tue, 08/18/2009 - 17:14 — Drew Beechum
All right, I know you guys are an opinionated bunch of so and so's.
What are your opinions. What isn't working, needs more work, etc.
Forums:
Taxonomy upgrade extras:
Theme?
Some sections of data gets lost in the framework of the site. But I think with some color and weaking it will come together.
The right column seems to be inthe way. Can the far right column be removed when viewing the forum?
Done
Wow. This is going to take some getting used to. I just finally got used to Windows 3.1.....
Okay.....1st suggestion. It is freaking awesome that you can sign up for activities, like the Christmas party at Stuft Sandwich and the 35th anniversery party. I'm guessing you have built in maximums for each event. Anyways, it's really cool that you don't have to send out an email and wonder if the organizer's email has declared you spam. But I would add the ability to enter a number of guests. I know I'll be taking my lovely (and more importantly, non-drinking) wife to the 35th anniversery party.
While you drunks were out camping, laughing, smiling, taking pictures, peeing on trees, throwing kegs, making jokes, stopping a fight, in general just having a good time..... I sat back this evening and clicked through the site. I see the home page is full of blogs. Yet the menu has a blogs link. I think Club Announcements and news should be on the home page just like the old site. If each announcement has a end date or a recuring schedule one could populate pertinent data and have the CMS display the news. You could pre-populate that perhaps. As an example the July Shop Brew and HomeBrew 101 classes are still listed. if the entries had expire dates then the day after the event they could auto disappear.. This I thought was a fairly standard feature...
Out of curiosity what software CMS package is this based on or is it custom made?
Offsite Avatar images and BB Code compatible signatures would be nice too....
Edit:
After posting this message, the page refreshed and displayed the thread. However no menu or nav bar was presented to get me back to the forum. I had ot use the left hand menu link to get back here. Kinda a PITA if you ask me...
PS What are you r plans for the Recipe section?
I've used Brewthology for an online recipe DB however my changing providers with updated PHP packages the program runs with errors now. I've been playing with BrewBlogger available at Google code and Source Forge. Pretty cool.
Edit 2:
OK I found the nav bar.... it is at the bottom of the page just above the footer. Probably should be duplicated to the top and perhaps dressed up with some CSS.
We're getting there, but there's more work to be done.
The intention for big club news and announcements is for those to live in 2 zones on the front page (either as a "headline" or as a sticky post ala the current "So What's Going on Here". I've left for now the blog postings and other bits promoted to the front page to encourage both content reading and content creation.
While we can do auto-content expiration, I've not turned it on just from the anticipation that content will be flowing fast enough that wnodes will disappear from the front page naturally and we'll keep the nodes visible for searching and historical purposes. For now, events expire out of the calendar listing at the right on the front page.
Recipes are waiting on a release of a module from the software team behind this CMS so that I can create them as a very extensible content type. I'm really strongly attempting to avoid as many 3rd party engine tie-ins to avoid endless integration nightmares. (The CMS is Drupal by the by)
We can do BBCode. I've never really been a big fan, I prefer html, but I know it's popular.
And yeah the breadcrumb totally needs to be topside. One of the next moves is to modify our theme just a bit away from the super plain version we have right now.
Maybe it's just my computer but this site is very slow loading pages, navigating around the site seems to take forever.