Submitted by griffon on Mon, 04/19/2010 - 11:08pm
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Sorry guys, clearly things are taking a bit longer then anticipated to get everything back up and running. We are still sorting through the module soup ingredients to get things flavorful again. Mike is working on the theme, the old one could not work with drupal 6 but on the plus side drupal 6 opens up a lot of options we did not have before.
EDIT: We're done with all the heavy lifting. The site should be stable and useable for the foreseeable future. Carry on.
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Final Word
Thanks Rick! I need to take a break from Drupal admin stuff to work on my iPhone programming in earnest, so it'll be static for awhile. Eventually I'd like to put some semblance of our old theme back together, but that's a multi-day project and will likely wait at least a few weeks. For now, it's the theme you see or bust. I've become too attached to the "Super Fish" menus at the top of the page to use anything else, so it limits the themes I can build from unless I want to scratch-build, which is not in the cards.
Ariande Bard 20 • Nightfall Ranger 19
The Avatars, Argonessen Server
Site looks good
Mike, Griffon:
The site looks good and seems more functional than previously. I'm sure there are tweaks ahead, but wanted to thank-you both for maintaining things. It's much appreciated.
Notifications
Notification e-mail for subscribed content now come from the user that posted the comment or update. So, you CAN reply to them directly by e-mail. Most of the time we'd prefer you respond on the site, so everyone can benefit from the conversation, but the option is there for non-site follow-up.
Also, I've un-stickied all of the events and added an Upcoming Events block to the front page, on the left. Let me know how you like that. Events will no longer dominate the top of the front page. I'll be adding the Darkwylde and Razmir events to the books for those games, so they are accessible from the normal book navigation.
Image Uploads
OK, I now have image uploads working in the editor. You just insert an image and in the URL box click the Browse Server button. That leads to a pop-up page where you can click the Upload button, and then finally send the link back to CKEditor. Too byzantine for my tastes, but functional. We should try to improve on that.
Got It!
Just as I was about to give up, I found the correct setting to allow users to sign up for Taxonomy (tag) subscriptions. Unfortunately, all of the old subscription info was lost, but it's working! Now we just need to test the actual notifications to see how they look/work. Huzzah!
Taxonomy Notifications
OK, I'm about done screwing with things here. I've reconstituted all of my books. Most things work better than they did before. However, we're still missing the ability to subscribe to taxonomy terms (like ddo, wow, etc.), so people aren't getting notifications when a topic is updated. For now, you'll need to subscribe to specific posts or books if you want notifications. Hopefully when we get the taxonomy notifications working the old subscriptions will still be there.
I worked on that for over an hour yesterday and failed to get it working. Hopefully Griffon will have better luck.
Please let me know if you don't care for the theme. I won't build a custom theme right now, but I can find some options you may like better.
I like the current color
I like the current color scheme-very easy on the eyes and enough color to be attractive.
I got the Taxonomy Images
I got the Taxonomy Images module installed and working, but all the old associations are gone, and currently it just shows the image directly under the link, which isn't what we want. More tinkering to do, but I suspect that will wait for the great Themes project as well.
Site Index
Please note that you can now see all of the content that relates to any category we've set up on the site by using the sub-menus from the "Home" option in the menu bar at the top. The numbers in parenthesis are the number of nodes (content items, not counting comments) which have that category associated with them.
Not Spice--Contrast
After reflection, it's not spice, it's contrast. I think if the light grey bars along the far left and right sides of the site were darker (black or dark blue?) it would make a big difference.
Looks Good
The theme currently looks good and is very easy on the eyes, if a little bland. If anything is needed, it would be a small tweak to spice it up a bit. Not sure how to do that without making it an eyesore. All in all, a very professional, pleasant-looking site.
Theme
So, the theming for Drupal 6 is seriously complex and will take more time to grokk than I have right now. I'm planning to stick with the theme you see currently, unless someone suggests. If you have ideas for the header bar color or the color of the background. side menus, and sticky posts, let me know. The header bar is a gradient from one color to another that I can control. The background, side menu headers and bodies, and sticky post bodies are all just different shades of one base color. I think it looks decent in gold, grey, and blue, but it gets too dark with black or navy.
We have a serious problem
We have a serious problem with a lot of the pages and "books" from the old site. The database is corrupted and sees them as belonging to books that do not exist, but which disallow them from recognizing any parent page. It means I have to reconstitute each page by cutting and pasting. Any old comments are lost. Still chugging.
Looking Good
The site is really starting to come together--looks pretty good and I know it's not all the way there yet. Appreciate all the work you two do on it.