110 replies to this topic

[red knight]

WARNING: This thread has been disclosed just for documentation purposes, the new design has been already settled and implemented. The remaining features that will be added are what we are going to focus in the next iterations.

Well in a chat with the Rincewind, Mindstormmaster and Me we have gathered the requirements for the new site.

Required Functionality
----------------------

* Login for modify members

* Image galery
* Recruit application form
- That would include the ability to define them by department
* Maybe build a tie-in with the paypal donations system.

* Modificable news
* Downloads page
* FAQ page

* Upload models/textures for artists.

If we forgot anything, post it here... We will start coding following this functionality criterion.

Greetings
Federico

Edited by red knight, 03 July 2006 - 09:59 AM.

[stewart]

How does recruit application form, tie in with forum access?

[mindstormmaster]

How does recruit application form, tie in with forum access?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

We don't know yet. That will be figured out as we work out the details of each part.

[red knight]

Mindstormmaster, can you put the summary of the specifications that we did the other day? So we can have input from the other seniors... I will probably assign Azrael to do some stuff with that, given his seniority in the CTD too.

Greetings
Federico

[mindstormmaster]

Site Redesign Specifications
*Image Gallery
*Recruit Application Form
*Updatable News
*Downloads page
*FAQ
*Artist's model/texture upload page
-PayPal Donation system

Login system/user authentication
*Accounts are created by an administrator
*User roles control access to site aspects
*Lost passwords are randomly generated and emailed to the user

News
*Users with "news" role can post news
*If a news post is longer than 100 words, the first 100 words are shown on the main page with a link to the full post.
*Old news is automatically listed on the archived news page
*News "expires" by date or by number of posts per page.
News can be marked as exempt from default expiration.
-News can be scheduled to appear on a future date

Image Gallery
*Images are divided into categories (ie. battlescape, geoscape, etc)
*Image thumbnails are automatically generated by the server.
*New images can be uploaded to the gallery by users with "gallery" role.
*Images can be moved to a different category.
-Comments can be added to images.

Member Roster
*Department management (Add, Delete, Rename)
*Senior board management (Add/remove members)
*User management (assign/unassign department membership)
*User profile page (world visible)

Recruit Application
*Two part form, first part is common to Xenocide, second part is specific to departments
*Questions can be added/removed from the application

Edited by mindstormmaster, 09 August 2005 - 05:24 PM.

[red knight]

Mindstormmaster, can we start right away with the Login system?

Login system/user authentication
*Accounts are created by an administrator
*User roles control access to site aspects
*Lost passwords are randomly generated and emailed to the user

Greetings
Red Knight

[mindstormmaster]

I can try to get an authentication framework started.

[red knight]

Great.

Greetings
Federico

[mindstormmaster]

I'm leaving for 7 weeks, starting pretty much today. I probably won't be able to do much until I get back. So this is on hold until then.

If there are other design requirements, add them and I'll review them when I get back.

[Vaaish]

Site Redesign Specifications
*Image Gallery
*Recruit Application Form
*Updatable News
*Downloads page
*FAQ
*Artist's model/texture upload page
-PayPal Donation system

Login system/user authentication
*Accounts are created by an administrator
*User roles control access to site aspects
*Lost passwords are randomly generated and emailed to the user

News
*Users with "news" role can post news
*If a news post is longer than 100 words, the first 100 words are shown on the main page with a link to the full post.
*Old news is automatically listed on the archived news page
*News "expires" by date or by number of posts per page. 
News can be marked as exempt from default expiration.
-News can be scheduled to appear on a future date

Image Gallery
*Images are divided into categories (ie. battlescape, geoscape, etc)
*Image thumbnails are automatically generated by the server.
*New images can be uploaded to the gallery by users with "gallery" role.
*Images can be moved to a different category.
-Comments can be added to images.

Member Roster
*Department management (Add, Delete, Rename)
*Senior board management (Add/remove members)
*User management (assign/unassign department membership)
*User profile page (world visible)

Recruit Application
*Two part form, first part is common to Xenocide, second part is specific to departments
*Questions can be added/removed from the application

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

since we are now using SVN, is the need to have a form for uploading models andtextures not obsolete and unnessary for the site?

[mindstormmaster]

since we are now using SVN, is the need to have a form for uploading models andtextures not obsolete and unnessary for the site?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, I don't think we need that anymore. But the image gallery is still nice for showing screenshots or concept art.

[Vaaish]

since we are now using SVN, is the need to have a form for uploading models andtextures not obsolete and unnessary for the site?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, I don't think we need that anymore. But the image gallery is still nice for showing screenshots or concept art.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

wasn't planning on deleting the image gallery

[red knight]

Well we can still store the screenshots on the SVN and the site would only retrieve them and allow to categorize them.

Greetings
Federico

[mindstormmaster]

Could it be possible to allow certain members to put others in moderation? We've had a problem recently with one and there was no Admin to take care of it, luckily Red Knight could, but I was thinking it would be good to allow members of Global Moderator status and Seniors to put someone into moderation, what do you think?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Moderation for what? Posting news?

The user management will be entirely separate from the forums.

[Vaaish]

Ok after much silence I finally got some time to sit down and start bringing a concept together. This is an alpha stage concept and doesn't have alot of bells and whistles or perfect hierarchy yet but you get the idea

Attached Files

•  Concept01.jpg   98.02K   53 downloads

[mindstormmaster]

How will this scale for larger resolutions? At 1280x1024 it looks really narrow, and I hate wasting space on my screen.

I'm also looking at different/new web frameworks to use for the site. Right now it looks like JavaServer Faces (MyFaces) is a very good candidate for this.

Edited by mindstormmaster, 06 November 2005 - 11:37 PM.

[ATeX]

it's an alpha as he said. I'm sure a lot will change.

Looking pretty good until now. What about ANY designer throwing in an alpha and then blend the best elements togheter?


cheers,

Thomas

Edited by ATeX, 07 November 2005 - 02:42 AM.

[Vaaish]

it's an alpha as he said. I'm sure a lot will change.

Looking pretty good until now. What about ANY designer throwing in an alpha and then blend the best elements togheter?


cheers,

Thomas

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

you are more than welcome to stick one in, I started up because I finally got the free time to work on it again and last I'd checked with you you ahd gotten bogged down

[Vaaish]

How will this scale for larger resolutions?  At 1280x1024 it looks really narrow, and I hate wasting space on my screen.

I'm also looking at different/new web frameworks to use for the site.  Right now it looks like JavaServer Faces (MyFaces) is a very good candidate for this.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I was thinking more along the lines of a fixed scale. I'm not too fond of websites that stretch themselves out to fill whatever size browser I have. They tend to be a little contrived and wasteful on their use of space.


BLank space helps pad the boundaries and draw attention to the site iteself.

That said I'm not opposed to dynamically scaling it to properly fill the screen at higher resolutions. My screen back home is @ 1280x1024 and I'm not bothered too much by the blank space around it. I'm designing the site for 800x600 res. so maybe use the CSS points instead of px call for text and size.

[ATeX]

yes, I'm still not able to work on it intensively. It's not that I bogged down. It's that I had (and still have) too much real life work. But there were quite a few designers that applied for the ART department. How about them? How are they going btw?


cheers,

Thomas

[Vaaish]

We have gotten one or two good ones, but they are primarily 2d aritsts not designers. I've not see any that are good graphic designers.

[ATeX]

ok, time to bump the topics on the recruiting forums then. I'll do that this evening. With a little bit of luck, we might attract some more artists then.

cya later,

Thomas

[mindstormmaster]

I was thinking more along the lines of a fixed scale. I'm not too fond of websites that stretch themselves out to fill whatever size browser I have. They tend to be a little contrived and wasteful on their use of space.


BLank space helps pad the boundaries and draw attention to the site iteself.

That said I'm not opposed to dynamically scaling it to properly fill the screen at higher resolutions. My screen back home is @ 1280x1024 and I'm not bothered too much by the blank space around it. I'm designing the site for 800x600 res. so maybe use the CSS points instead of px call for text and size.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I take issue with sites that only use 700px of my 1280px width. Especially if they scroll down three pages or so. What about designing for 1024x768? That seems to be a pretty common one among gamers. In my very humble opinion, anyone that runs 800x600 or lower deserves to be shot.
That said, I do agree that sites that dynamically size themselves do sometimes look a bit odd. However, if there were a couple points in the design that were setup to expand horizontally, the designs usually work.

[Vaaish]

actually a majority of the population still uses 1024x768 and 800x600 (combined something 80%) with 25 to 30% using 800x600.

and to cater to the lowest common denominator (considering it is still quite a chunk of the visiting populace) the site should be designed for 800x600. Using CSS measurments not tied to pixels should look fine on most screen resolutions even if the page doesn't dynamically scale horizontally.

[mindstormmaster]

I'm just saying that my personal preference is sites that don't waste space. There have been some really bad designs that do this, and some designs that are optimized for 800x600 that aren't bad.

Two sites that I take some issue with:
http://dystopia-game.com/ - The left side image means that space is dead lower on the screen. The right side panels are blank lower on the page, leading to even more dead space. The effective width of the page is about a third of my screen size, or just over 400px. Long posts with lots of text end up scrolling vertically, something I don't like.
http://www.ivslo.org/ - Again, wasted space below the nav-menu on the left side. Wasted space = scrolling.

A statistics source claims the number of people using 800x600 or less is about 23%, with the rest at 1024 or higher. I can add in some statistical reporting to the xenocide site to gather resolution stats for our visitors.

As an aside, it is possible to determine the resolution of a user's browser through javascript. So it is possible to create layouts optimized for both, and have it dynamically selected. Probably a bad idea though.

Just my personal beef.

[Vaaish]

yeah having 2 layouts for different res is a pain to update.

and any demographics on the resolution of most of our visitors would be good to determine what we need.

23% is still more than enough to warrent designing for 800x600. however the final version will use more of the horizontal width.

[Vaaish]

A small update but I think this refine most of the functionality and solidifys the layout a bit more.

Attached Files

•  Concept01.jpg   103.51K   42 downloads

[mindstormmaster]

Looks good. I'll probably be working to get some basic framework working for the programing aspect.

For the last couple hours, here's the resolution breakdown. This will become a bit more solid after a couple days or weeks.

1024x768     56 %
1280x1024     25 %
800x600     8.3 %
1152x864     4.5 %
1280x960     3 %
Others     3 %

Edited by mindstormmaster, 07 November 2005 - 05:05 PM.

[red knight]

Looking very good so far. Excelent work.

Greetings
Federico

[Vaaish]

Small update:

Site has been resized to fill a maximised browser window @ 1024x768 after we looked over the demographics for our visitors.

The overall layout has been tightened up and added the info on the status bar as an idea... we could put past pictures of the day up there or quick links to news topics.

For other pages like the gallery it could be a menu section for easy access to the subsections.


There are some color tweaks I want to make before I give the layout its final polish.

Any major changes ot things I missed we need on the page?

Attached Files

•  Concept01.jpg   139.01K   47 downloads

[mindstormmaster]

I like the idea of the putting information in the status bar. I think we should only use it for certain pages though. The news page definetly should have the current status, though I don't know about the "project status". Downloads could have the current release, and the gallery could have a random image from each category.

[mindstormmaster]

News: Are we going to have all news listed on the main site? or do we have an age-cutoff? or do we need a "View Older News" (or something like it) button ?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

There will be a cutoff, so yes there will need to be a "view older" link.

[mindstormmaster]

Is is possible to create our own paypal button that will match with the color scheme? Or just move it into a "panel"? I'm going to setup an automatic tracking of our donations, so it will be possible to have a count of our current funds if we so desired. Or we could set monthly targets and have a progress bar type thing.

I'm going to work up a better site map/flow diagram and post that. Hopefully that'll be up tonight.

[Vaaish]

I don't know if we can or can't change the paypal button so thats why I left it how it is.

for the gallery page instead of a random image I think it would be much more effective to have the image categories up there.

What we end up putting on the main page status section I'm not really partial but it needs to fill the area reasonably well or we should just leave it blank.

Edited by Vaaish, 09 November 2005 - 07:14 PM.

[mindstormmaster]

Here's a rough outline of the site map. A good portion of the pages shown are administrative.

I'll see if I can get some page descriptions together soon. These should actually tell you what's on the page, and where and how they link to.

Attached Files

•  site_map.JPG   885.92K   40 downloads

[Micah]

The PayPal buttong could easily be redesigned however we want it. PayPal does not stipulate what the button/link must look like.

Here is some demographic data taken from a counter attached to www.projectxenocide.com/index.html for the month of October 2005.

1024x768 48% (2,482)
1280x1024 27% (1,392)
1152x864 5% (273)
800x600 5% (269)
1280x960 3% (165)
1600x1200 3% (149)
1280x800 2% (122)
Unknown 1% (77)
1400x1050 1% (73)
1680x1050 1% (42)
1920x1200 1% (36)

[ATeX]

that means 1024x768 is the way to go.


cheers,

Thomas

[Vaaish]

yup the site has allready been adapted

[ATeX]

great! that was fast. Can't wait to see it.

cheers,

Thomas

[Vaaish]

you already have... it was in the last pic I posted

[Vaaish]

ok, next layout update.


I've added in a couple of menu options and other layout changes that Mindstorm and I talked about and increased the number of news entries placed.

I think this is ready for cleanup and finalization.

Attached Files

•  Concept01.jpg   190.42K   47 downloads

Edited by Vaaish, 10 November 2005 - 05:51 PM.

[mindstormmaster]

Very nice.

I think we're just missing a "register" link from the login box. Or is this with the "Join"? Or is registration done from the administrative side and the account details sent to the user?

Also, maybe include the "login" panel after a user has logged in.

[ATeX]

great work!


cheers,

Thomas

[mindstormmaster]

Is this Site going to direct to XCOMUFO? or Xenocide-specific forums?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It should go straight to the xenocide specific forums.

[Vaaish]

Very nice. 

I think we're just missing a "register" link from the login box.  Or is this with the "Join"?  Or is registration done from the administrative side and the account details sent to the user?

Also, maybe include the "login" panel after a user has logged in.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I was thinking that account details would be sent with the "join" function if they had been accepted as a recruit in xenocide.

I plan to include the afterlogin page once everything else on the front is tied down

[Vaaish]

Final update to the main page functionality.

I am also kind of partial to the simple, clean layout and not going back in and adding eye candy.

Tell me what you guys think, if yu are good with it we wil leave it as is and start on subpages.

Attached Files

•  Concept01.jpg   190.83K   56 downloads

Edited by Vaaish, 11 November 2005 - 05:59 PM.