Hi all, and a Merry Christmas!
I've been fiddling about with the layout of nottingham.og.o, and have a few minor issues with the templates I'd like to bring up:
* It appears there is no div that covers all the actual content of a node; the 'content' div seems to include the navbar as well. Is this intentional? For what I was hoping to do with the layout, these being separate divs would probably be really useful -- either for the content div to stop including the navbar, or for some other div to be created including the rest of the content div, after the navbar.
* There are two search boxes on every page (navbar, footer). Would it be easy to add a config option to not have one of them, or just lose the footer one altogether, or something? I think the one in the navbar is more immediately visible, so I'd probably prefer to keep that one.
(There's probably also an argument for a special one in home_node.tt somewhere, for guides which have no navbar on the front page, or something.)
* The Recent Changes box on the front page looks quite cluttered, and is bigger than I'd like; one solution to this would be to lose most of it, just retaining the node names, and maybe the marker proposed in http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=9068. But, I realise some guides might want the full version of this box, as it stands. So I suggest a new config option (yes, I know, another question at install time...) called something like minimal_recent_changes which can then be used in the templates to remove the 'fluff' from this box as appropriate.
I'm also not convinced of the point of the "edit this page" link in the recent changes box, but I assume that's there for a reason I've not thought of yet!
As another alternative, could the recent changes front page box be made optional altogether? I assume this would be relatively easy to do, and I think this is if anything a _more_ useful option than the navbar being optional.
There's probably other stuff, but it's 3am. I'll follow up to this message next week, no doubt :-)
Cheers, James.
On Sun, Dec 26, 2004 at 03:21:32AM +0000, James Green wrote:
- It appears there is no div that covers all the actual content of a node;
the 'content' div seems to include the navbar as well. Is this intentional? For what I was hoping to do with the layout, these being separate divs would probably be really useful -- either for the content div to stop including the navbar, or for some other div to be created including the rest of the content div, after the navbar.
I agree that this is somewhat silly. However it might be simplest to invent a new div for the real content, to avoid screwing up existing stylesheets.
- There are two search boxes on every page (navbar, footer). Would it be
easy to add a config option to not have one of them, or just lose the footer one altogether, or something? I think the one in the navbar is more immediately visible, so I'd probably prefer to keep that one.
Yeah, I'd be happy to lose the footer one.
(There's probably also an argument for a special one in home_node.tt somewhere, for guides which have no navbar on the front page, or something.)
Definitely.
- The Recent Changes box on the front page looks quite cluttered, and is
bigger than I'd like; one solution to this would be to lose most of it, just retaining the node names, and maybe the marker proposed in http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=9068. But, I realise some guides might want the full version of this box, as it stands. So I suggest a new config option (yes, I know, another question at install time...) called something like minimal_recent_changes which can then be used in the templates to remove the 'fluff' from this box as appropriate.
Or, for example, what's on Earle's front page: http://london.openguides.org/. In fact, I'd very much like it if some of the good work on the templates on London makes it back in. It would be nice to have the second navbar, including a custom template so that the actual list of categories could be customized easily.
I'm also not convinced of the point of the "edit this page" link in the recent changes box, but I assume that's there for a reason I've not thought of yet!
London seems to have wikitext in its recent changes which is displayed. Which is confusing, because clearly it isn't Just Another Wiki Node. Dunno how to best resolve that. Have a macro for recent changes instead?
As another alternative, could the recent changes front page box be made optional altogether? I assume this would be relatively easy to do, and I think this is if anything a _more_ useful option than the navbar being optional.
Or integrated, cf London.
I'll try to look at some of the above when I get back home in the New Year.
There's probably other stuff, but it's 3am. I'll follow up to this message next week, no doubt :-)
Send hot patches! :)
Cheers,
Dom.
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 06:34:15PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
Yeah, I'd be happy to lose the footer [search box].
Thirded.
I'd very much like it if some of the good work on the templates on London makes it back in.
Sure - I'll have a look at this when I have some time in the next week or two, depending on my commitments.
London seems to have wikitext in its recent changes which is displayed. Which is confusing, because clearly it isn't Just Another Wiki Node.
I think you're referring to some edit comments I made. This is a habit I picked up from Wikipedia; I'm aware that this doesn't do anything at the moment. It was kind of a reminder to myself to make a suggestion here about it, which I can now do.
I think it would be very useful if Recent Changes comments could support precisely one form of wiki syntax, namely local links ([[blah]]). It's a nice thing to be able to do when documenting certain types of edits, e.g. category/locale changes, because it means you can look at a comment that says "moved from Category X to Category Y" and click through straight into those categories to decide for yourself if it was a good edit. There's no reason to support any other kind of syntax in the comments, though, due to obvious security issues.
What d'you think?
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 07:36:37PM +0000, Earle Martin wrote:
[Recent Changes]
Oh, and another thing I meant to mention.
For a while we've had the rather nice "Pages changed in the last..." blocks on Recent Changes (thanks Kake). A small niggle I have with this is that each block has its own table, which means the columns don't line up from one block to another, which is a little messy. I'm aware that the current structure provides stylesheet hooks for each block, and I'm not quite sure how that could be done if they were all in one table (and hence neater).
Sorry, I don't have time right now to have a go at this one, but I thought I might as well mention it. I'll look into it with the other changes I mentioned I'll do if no one's come up with a solution by then.
Cheers,
Earle.
Earle Martin wrote:
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 07:36:37PM +0000, Earle Martin wrote:
[Recent Changes]
Oh, and another thing I meant to mention.
And something *I* meant to mention - the Recent Changes page should be hidden from search engine robots so that any spam which does get through whatever anti-spam measures we put in place is not so easily accessible.
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 07:36:37PM +0000, Earle Martin wrote:
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 06:34:15PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
Yeah, I'd be happy to lose the footer [search box].
Thirded.
Will wait for you to look at your London changes before doing anything about this, because the default front page won't have any search box otherwise.
London seems to have wikitext in its recent changes which is displayed. Which is confusing, because clearly it isn't Just Another Wiki Node.
I think you're referring to some edit comments I made. This is a habit I picked up from Wikipedia; I'm aware that this doesn't do anything at the moment. It was kind of a reminder to myself to make a suggestion here about it, which I can now do.
No, I mean the text that appears in the content box at http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi?id=RecentChanges;action=edit.
There is clearly unexplained magic happening here; if it is a wiki node, it should just contain a macro that lets it list recent changes. If it's not, why does it contain an editable wikitext space?
I think it would be very useful if Recent Changes comments could support precisely one form of wiki syntax, namely local links ([[blah]]). It's a nice thing to be able to do when documenting certain types of edits, e.g. category/locale changes, because it means you can look at a comment that says "moved from Category X to Category Y" and click through straight into those categories to decide for yourself if it was a good edit. There's no reason to support any other kind of syntax in the comments, though, due to obvious security issues.
Hmm, I'm not so keen on this. It seems like too much added complexity for the benefit.
On Sun, Dec 26, 2004 at 03:21:32AM +0000, James Green wrote:
- It appears there is no div that covers all the actual content of a node;
the 'content' div seems to include the navbar as well. Is this intentional? For what I was hoping to do with the layout, these being separate divs would probably be really useful -- either for the content div to stop including the navbar, or for some other div to be created including the rest of the content div, after the navbar.
What do you define as "content"? The title of the node? The metadata? The freetext content? The latitude and longitude? The tools related to searching by distance from that node? (should the lat/long be moved to the rest of the metadata?) Information on when the node was last added and links to other versions?
Cheers,
Dominic.
On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 08:08:13PM +0000, David Cantrell wrote:
And something *I* meant to mention - the Recent Changes page should be hidden from search engine robots so that any spam which does get through whatever anti-spam measures we put in place is not so easily accessible.
I don't think this is any different to any other page on an OpenGuides site. Spam needs to be removed, one way or another, from the database, then it won't appear in recentchanges, nor anywhere else.
Dominic.
On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:29:35PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
What do you define as "content"? The title of the node? The metadata? The freetext content? The latitude and longitude? The tools related to searching by distance from that node? (should the lat/long be moved to the rest of the metadata?) Information on when the node was last added and links to other versions?
All of that, yes. Everything that isn't the navbar, footer or banner. (And that's a fair question; is there some reason they were separated out from the other metadata?)
Cheers, James
On Sun 09 Jan 2005, Dominic Hargreaves dom@earth.li wrote:
No, I mean the text that appears in the content box at http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi?id=RecentChanges;action=edit.
There is clearly unexplained magic happening here; if it is a wiki node, it should just contain a macro that lets it list recent changes. If it's not, why does it contain an editable wikitext space?
It has an editable wikitext space so people can add things like the note on the Livejournal feed (added by mzdt I believe), or perhaps someone might want to make change summaries like other wikis have (done manually I believe). I wouldn't be against there being another way to do this if you can come up with one. I do think the RecentChanges page is a good place for such information to live, but if someone can come up with a better one that's fine too.
Kake
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