New Site Design - More Changes Coming
If you happened to stop by the site before reading this in your RSS reader, you've already seen the new design.
There's been a lot of changes already, but there are a whole lot more changes planned. My primary goal with this redesign was to unite the codebases… we're using WordPress 2.x for the main how-to articles section, bbPress for the forum, and WordPress MU to power the blogs. The only integration to this point was integration between the user databases… so you are logged in everywhere with the same username.
The problem was that each theme was completely different, with it's own template, stylesheet and images, which meant that making any change to the site required going into multiple different places to make the same change… and since the forum wasn't using the same YUI grids CSS as the rest of the site, nothing ever seemed to match anywhere.
So now there's one single common header, footer, and sidebar file, and one common CSS file for the whole site. There's an additional CSS for the forum, since there's a lot of elements that don't need to be included in the rest of the site. Now I can make a change to the header or footer, or even the fonts and colors, and they will be applied across the entire site.
There's still a lot of cleanup to do, and I'll be adding new features to the site over the next few weeks.
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The only thing that i do not like about the new site design is that there is no more login on the main page of the forums. now you have to click login then enter your info.
Agreed.
My plan has been to enable a digg-style login form, where you click the Login link and it dynamically shows you the login form right there. There's just not enough space in the header to show a login form all the time without making everything cluttered… especially once the new sections/features are added.
great idea on uniting the different code bases. i know from personal experience that a whole bunch of misc code thrown together always has potential problems. good design upgrades also
Uh, could you consider a couple of improvements to the forum? A good search tool might reduce the number of instances of a particular question. And it would be helpful to have a way to get to page 5 or 8 of a long thread without having to sequentially page through the thread. Maybe a page jump window? I like the relative simplicity of the forum layout campared with some other styles out there on the net.