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Design update

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by Daniel on Jul 21, 2009 3:01:20 PM - 10,411 views

As you might notice if you've ever visited PHP Freaks before, we've updated the design. Jeff Combs, one of our members, has been making a lot of design changes. He was also the person who was behind the design we had before.

I've been working on implementing his new design changes. There have also been some extensive modifications on the backend, but I guess I'm pretty much the only person who knows about them.

I wanted to introduce some new features along with this update, but unfortunately I've had to postpone those. I'm not going to scrap them, but they will just be rolled out later, so stay tuned for those.

Hopefully the design adjustments we've made should make the site more aesthetically pleasing and a little more accessible.

If there are any issues, do report them either in a comment here, as a new topic in the suggestions board or write to my email address. Either way the message should get to me.

Comments

Jeff Combs Jul 22, 2009 11:34:37 AM

Looks pretty good Dan. I'd consider increasing the height of the comment textarea. It would be nice to have the avatars from the forums carry over into the comments. I'm not sure how difficult that would be to integrate.

Maybe in a future update we can add the author panel. I think we also need to add in a category system for the tutorials, not sure if that was planned for a future update as well.

Overall, came out really nice I think.

Daniel Jul 22, 2009 11:40:53 AM

Tutorial categories are planned. Don't worry :)
http://i25.tinypic.com/1zq3s5f.jpg

I'll have a look at increasing the text areas for commenting, or maybe even add some Javascript that allows dynamic resizing.

Jeff Combs Jul 22, 2009 12:19:14 PM

Nice, I like the tag cloud idea, glad to see that is what you are going to use.

A re-size handle isn't a bad idea.

Jeff Combs Jul 22, 2009 12:20:44 PM

I noticed that the main page says 0 comments for the blog entries.

Daniel Jul 22, 2009 1:15:31 PM

Oh. Fixed now.

Timothy McKeown Jul 23, 2009 2:22:25 PM

Everything looks really nice. I've noticed the community stats here and on the forums "Home" page are different. Also, the login fields extend awkwardly far.

Daniel Jul 24, 2009 1:26:31 PM

What do you mean with "extend awkwardly far"? Screenshot perhaps?

Timothy McKeown Jul 24, 2009 2:40:57 PM

Viewing with FF3 on Ubuntu Intrepid.

Daniel Jul 24, 2009 4:32:25 PM

Oh that one. I thought you meant the one in the sidebar. Yeah, generally I just made all form fields 100% wide. Check out the content forms as well. I suppose I can make regular text fields more narrow though.

Michał Jarosz Jul 25, 2009 7:12:02 AM

Any news on 'News' section? The feeds are so outdated now, that we should probably just hide this section until it works again.

Daniel Jul 25, 2009 9:23:12 AM

Oh yeah I totally forgot about that. I did fix the news feed thing, so I just have to enable it again.

Daniel Jul 25, 2009 9:30:28 AM

Okay enabled again.

Michał Jarosz Jul 30, 2009 8:21:04 AM

Sweet! Now I'll have to actually think of a topic to blog about instead of posting about new PHP releases :P

phpzone Sep 22, 2009 4:28:05 AM

Not visited in a while, I love the new design, really like what's been done on the right hand nav and the login boxes, looking good! I once did a mock up for a tutorial site I was going to do and it had a flashy design, I asked people what they thought and they said people didn't care about a nice design, but I beg to differ, a nice looking site is more likely to keep people visiting I think especially if it's got good content as well :-)

mrMarcus Nov 2, 2009 6:04:24 PM

i get a large white space right down the center of the homepage (http://www.phpfreaks.com) .. see the attached pic:

[IMG]http://i38.tinypic.com/153mst5.jpg[/IMG]

i'm using Firefox 3.5.4 / Windows 7

mrMarcus Nov 2, 2009 8:17:20 PM

sorry, image above is a cropped image over the original screenshot i took .. you're not seeing doubles.

elum.chaitu Sep 4, 2010 8:48:50 AM

Sorry not visited in a while but i love the new design, really like what's been done on the right hand nav and the login boxes, looking good! I once did a mock up for a tutorial site I was going to do and it had a flashy design.

elum.chaitu Sep 4, 2010 8:49:34 AM

you will get more information for designing updates here

http://www.eluminoustechnologies.com/web_designing.htm

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