The new design looks absolutely awesome. Even I will change my bookmark to RMFF.net instead of straight to the boards! I appreciate your hard work on this and think you've included lots of necessary elements. I think the event ticker is one of the most important parts as there is always stuff going on and coming up on short notice. IMHO, it should go above the Swag box. What are the "Join" and "Check-in items" links? How often would you like to change the poll? Should be coming up with that be a council member's responsibility (with help from everybody else, of course)? Is there other content we can put on the home page besides meeting notes? Something from other threads? Hmm... Under the User Menu, will "Logout? be called "Login" if you haven't logged in yet? The colors and layout look fabulous. Good job, Grimby. "We will watch your career with much interest."
Thanks man, glad you like it. [image=http://i40.tinypic.com/6sql4x.jpg] (reposted for reference) Since the events ticker at the top will actually be cycling constantly through the list of upcoming events, I opted to put the swag section in between that and the full list of events so there weren't two of the same thing right next to each other. I get emails every once in a while from people asking how they can join. We all know that it doesn't take much to join, but people surfing the site for the first time don't know that. So when they click on that link there will be a short explanation of how to register for the boards and start posting, and/or just show up at a meeting. The "check-in items" link and all the stuff under "User Menu" only shows up when you are logged into the web site. When you're not logged in, that section just displays the standard login form. If someone wants to come up with new polls, I'm all for it. I anticipate having a system where pretty much anyone who is designated as a content publisher can create their own poll and it will be published to the site just like any other article. From there, someone like me can designate it as the poll on the front page. Certainly. We can post articles of anything newsworthy, like new Starfest photos being up in the gallery, updates regarding upcoming events like the costume sweat shop, etc. And since all new articles will be auto published to both Twitter and Facebook (this is really why I signed up, people ), all updates will be instantly beamed to whatever medium people are using to follow us. Of course. Thanks, but you haven't even seen what the new Gallery is going to look like.
Speaking of which, it hasn't been customized yet, but check out the new design theme for the gallery! Notice the new slideshow format when viewing images. You can click on the image itself to view the slideshow, or click the image name to go to the regular image page with more info and to select different sizes. Oh and by the way it looks freakin' awesome.
Freakin awesome. What a flash-enabled photo gallery should look like and how it should function. Very, very cool and so much better than photobucket!!
Just a quick note regarding the web site: I am currently in the process of moving rmff.net to a new semi-dedicated server where my personal web site is now located. They tell me this will result in zero downtime during the transition tonight, but I just wanted everyone to be aware just in case. Being hosted on a semi-dedicated server means there should be more network resources available and the site should load faster. I tested downloading a large file from my personal site last night and was averaging about 600k/s. With my previous account I was only getting about 100-200k/s tops. Anyway, if anybody notices that rmff.net is down at any point in the next 24-48 hours please let me know ASAP.
Looks like the site is down. I got this error message today: >> Visitors, we are sorry, however, this site is experiencing difficulties at this time. Please return later. Webmaster, please contact us by email at support@lunarpages.com or via Lunarpages Helpdesk at http://support.lunarpages.com. Thank you for choosing Lunarpages (http://www.lunarpages.com). 2010 © Lunarpages Web Hosting
I just wanted to mention here that I spent a good amount of time this weekend getting ready to update RMFF.net with the new design. I'm going to be migrating the site from Joomla over to Wordpress, and as soon as I can get the template customized to look like what I've posted in this thread, we'll be good to go. Target completion date is by Star Fest. Notable new site features will include: Facebook integration - ability log in with your Facebook account to post comments New articles automatically posted to Twitter and the RMFF Facebook Fan page RMFF YouTube video channel Random Polls
Which plugin are you using for the facebook integration? I'm using janrain on the Comicfest WP site for integration with Facebook, gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc. for login.
You just have to go through a lot of forms with every site to setup the Developer accounts so that you can authenticate through everyone. And pretty much every time there is and update to the plugin you have to put back in your security string, so make sure you save the emails with that.
Here's the latest version of the new web site: [image=http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/7991/rmfftemplate20102.jpg] There's still a bit of work needed to be done customizing some of the widgets, adding new ones, and migrating the gallery, but most of the work has been done at this point.
So excited!!!!! Good job Ben, I know (I really don't but can only imagine) how much work that takes. One beer for you at SF!!!!
So, apparently if you try to access rmff.net right now, you get a big 403 Forbidden error. I don't know what's causing this, but rest assured I am on it like Donkey Kong (-it?). Or, um, just pretend this is a reeeeeaaaally late April Fools joke.
