Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: OpenACS forums

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7: Re: OpenACS forums (response to 1)
Posted by Reuven Lerner on
I'm glad that Aldert has raised this issue again.

I'm currently working with three graphic designers on unrelated sites that use OpenACS.  In all three cases, the designers are confused by the templating system, baffled by the documentation, and intimidated by the existing forums.

We've moved openacs.org over to the new software.  We have the new forum system installed.  I think that it's about time to create a newbies/designers forum in which people can ask questions.  I'm being asked an overwhelming number of questions about OpenACS templates.  I often don't have the time to answer these questions -- and more importantly, I don't have all of the answers that they need.

The sooner that we can set up such a forum, the better it'll be for all of the non-programmers who are starting to use this system.  And if you're looking for volunteers, I'll happily be in charge of the forum.  It cannot possibly take more time than the phone calls I've been receiving...

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8: Re: OpenACS forums (response to 7)
Posted by Jeff Davis on
I am definitely interesting in working on making OpenACS more design friendly and I think a forum specificly oriented towards design and user experience would help.

I have been working in that direction but am hampered by the fact that I am a terrible designer and don't really have a good handle on what we should do. I think a design forum where people ask questions and make suggestions would raise the level of awareness for the developers about design issues and hopefully we will get to the point where changing the design of an OpenACS site is not such a perilous and often mind numbing task.

My view is that we should be ripping out most of what passes for design in the existing toolkit and making the whole thing much more CSS friendly. To do so we would need to first figure out a scheme for class names and id's, what does and doesn't need to have a class name, and also how to handle per package and per subsite customization. It's something we probably can't do without some reasonable tech savvy designers helping and a new forum might be a good way to kick off the effort.

Getting further off topic, beyond removing the per package master templates I have also been trying to make the html we generate xhtml compliant and cleaning things up generally. You can see an example of style sheet switching on my blog page, which is also proof of my claim that I am a terrible designer :)