Web design is now using a new theme called Southend. At some point these changes will migrate across to the SoSLUG site, replacing the Garland theme. Meanwhile, by comparing the two sites, you can judge for yourselves, whether the changes are positive or not. It is still a bit ragged around the edges, so we would appreciate your comments, especially if you find something that is broken.
The theme is a liquid layout, meaning that as the window size changes, the content portion of the page changes with it. Unlike Garland however, which will only expand up to a fixed limit around 1270 pixels), the Southend theme goes an expanding.
The other obvious difference is the banner at the top the page which has the potential to change with each new level of the menu. This has been moved from the section views, to provide more space for the content. If a banner doesn't yet exist for a given section, a default banner (missing puzzle piece) is show instead.
Look and feel
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Position of Taxonomy terms
I notice that the taxonomy terms in the Southend theme have moved from the bottom of the page. to the top. Why, is there a reason for this?
Forum topic format
The forum topics appear to be formatted differently from an ordinary page, i.e. two horizontal lines appear above and below the taxonomy terms.
Forum pages
Yes they are different because the forum module introduces its own page template. It is therefore possible to theme forum topics differently, to make them stand out from ordinary content pages.
Currently the web design portion of the site, has not implemented forums. To test the effect of this on the Southend theme, we need to set up a forum on that site. E.g. what impact if any has moving the taxonomy terms had?
As well as test bed, its a good training platform, and an opportunity to test the procedures outlined under Networking > Drupal workshop > Setup forum!
Moving taxonomy terms
Yes, two reasons. On the Garland theme the terms were at the bottom of the page, and to use them you had to scroll down. Placing them at the top of the content page avoids this, and in my opinion, raises their prominence.
the second reason, is that block views may be added to the bottom of a page, so the change gets them out of the way. We are still experimenting with this, and it is also likely that the comments option on these pages will be turned off, for the same reason; since these pages will primarily be "containers" for a view, and views don't have comments.
Incidentally the Garland theme specifies date:time - author, whereas the Southend theme specifies author - date:time
Font sizes
Great improvement, and so far no errors at all, however just one thing I should perhaps mention. A while ago it was discussed and agreed that the text used in the site would be easy to read catering for the partially blind. It has occurred to me we seem to have drifted somewhat from that stance. webstyle does indeed look much better but the text certainly in the menus is hard to read especially now I am partially sighted.
Garland and Southend Theme font sizes
The latest updates have improved the size of the fonts in the Southend theme, especially when compared with Garland. Incidentally while fixing this, I noticed the Opera and Chrome browsers were using a Sans-Serif font, not Serif (Verdana is a Serif font) which was the intended font. It appeared OK in Firefox. This turned out to be a missing comma in the Southend theme.
Why are the Garland fonts so small? The number of dots on a monitor are obviously fixed, the ratio between horizontal/vertical dimensions being known as the aspect ratio. As technology moves on, default screen sizes have moved from 800 x 600 (4:3) to 1024 x 768 px, so changing the screen resolution will alter the dots per inch. I suspect the Garland theme was developed with 72dpi as the standard whereas I noticed several of us are now using 96dpi. So if Garland set the font height to 16px then its notional size is 16/72 = 0.22 inches but with 96dpi is shrinks to 0.167 inches. That's my theory at least.
Contact information
Some first impressions. Of 1000 people who come to this sit from Google or any other search engine, 999 will have a good knowledge of what Linux and OSS is and why. The other one will have got there by mistake and will not know is what and who SoSlug is, what it does, how often they meet and where. Nowhere on the site could I find any "Contact us" or "Join us" info or welcome.
Contact us added totop of page
The contact information has now been added to the top of the page. Click on Contact us should provide the information you were looking for, and locate you in the menu under "About Soslug", where this information can be found