Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: navigation changes in dotLRN: RFC
Here are some comments:
- In the parameters section you are storing the language keys without the "#". This has one mayor drawback. If someone does not want to have an I18N version of his string he is stuck. Furthermore, when an administrator sees something like <span>#</span>mypackage.mystring#, he is vary, as this actually *looks* like code, whereas he might be wondering what mypackage.mystring is and how he can change that string to suit his purposes.
- I'm still convinced that the bar with "login", "your account" aso. should become tabs in the subnavbar section. This leaves only the "Welcome xyz" and the "xxx members online" links, saving up some space.
- The blinking Red Text is, well, annoying, and I'm yet unconvinced that it makes more sense to spend a whole new line for this text instead of putting it on the left of the subnavbars (and only show it if you are within a community). This being said, I'd ask you to display the title if you are outside a community (instead of "My Space").
- You left the title out completely. Though this is in line with my usual "make it as compact as possible" way of doing things, this breaks existing functionality in some packages as they rely on the title information (take contacts or project-manager as examples). This is why I added the title again below the navbars (centered in the middle). If you are going to display the title instead of the name of the community and change .LRN to set the title to the community name if there is no title set in the first place, then I think we are on to something for a generic solution.
- The breadcrump and the welcome string are on two seperate lines. This should be condensed to one line to save space. If the breadcrump get's too long, it could break into two lines.
- It would be great if the CSS file had comments what property has which effect.
- You are still using selva-blank-master. This sadly still breaks the developer support, so it would be great if you fix the selva-blank-master or use the /www/blank-master instead.
- The round corners from the Subnavbar TABs broke on IE6, maybe you fixed that already (no IE here to test, just remembered from some time ago).
- Can the round edges of the Subnavbar TAB be achieved without adding images to it? Otherwise changing the colors of the Subnavbar TAB is a nightmare (well, you need a graphic editor and can't rely on the CSS file). In this case I'd propably vote for using only blocks without round edges so it could be easily changed.
I18N : no, that's the opposite ! 😉 people are stuck if they non-I18N words ... I' m currently using catalog files not to require an extra version of other packages (OACS 5.2 in your case). I haven't find the solution now, but I would like not to rely on a package version, AND have the advantages of the ## words ... Furthermore, Rafael told me he had the 'missing keys' messages, but I couldn't find a computer when I saw it from my eyes (and be able to look at the code). Are you sure you restarted the server after install ? I think the catalog files are read only once at startup ...
login bar : yes, you are right ! The "your account" is already the same as the "preferences" tab anyway, and I can probably add the logout as the last tab ?
Blinking text : of course it was french humor, sorry 😊 It's not blinking anymore, but it's blue for My Space, and green for a community (that will be in the next release). As we have different opinion on that point, I would like other people (Vivian, Andrew, Rafael, ...) to give their opinion on that particular point. I disagree to display the title of the page if we are not in a community : this is just to have a very few values (My Space, and communities) to be a reference for people. The more different values, the more confusing it is ... Well, let's hear other opinions now.
Title : ok, I'll do it this way (if noone else express another constraint)
Breadcrumps, 2 lines : Be careful, you are going to have an argument with the designer 😉 Dorian did it this way, so I'll wait for her opinion on that. Even if I agree that in general "smaller is better", we must also think in term of "beautiful" and "space". A lot of people like when it is written large with lot of space, this is very subjective. On that also I would like to hear from other people !
CSS : yes for comments, and I'll also have to fix IE bugs BTW ... I am not using IE, so it is not my priority for the next week, but I hope to do that for the end of August.
blank-master : what kind of compatibility does it breaks ? Selva-blank-master is just a copy (I changed maybe the css links ?) of the /www/blank-master (from previous version of dotlrn, the one from debian package, I don't know if this code was modified in between ?)
Corner : see CSS.
Round edges : Dorian is working on another css without images at all (easier to change colors, lighter web page, etc). We can achieve the round edges without images only by using proprietary css extension (--moz-border-radius for mozilla and firefox for example) which is in my opinion not a good way as it is not standard. Otherwise a lot of ugly solution exist (like creating a lot of different areas inside a class, and move them from 1 px each. We have the result with the double html tags, and the page becomes unreadable ... 😟 ) At the end, I think we'll have 2 solutions : pictures, or blocks. I think we can propose both by default, and the user choose ?
Jeremy
PS : should we start a new thread now ? This one is becoming too long, and we can't find information in it anymore. I could start with a summup of what has been done ?
