On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 5:29 PM, Robert Ramey
Klaim - Joël Lamotte wrote
On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 6:32 AM, Robert Ramey <
ramey@
> wrote:
ps. Robert must have put some crafty code into the website - right now it manages to reliably blow out my Firefox (-;
Hmmm - I just went through it with firefox (on my MAC) and didn't find any problems.
Just to clarify: that quote was not not from me.
By the way there is indeed a lot of problems from my pov and I was thinking (by experience) that if you want this kind of website/application, you probably want to stay away from wordpress... but then you'll have to develop a bit. Certainly worth it but I can't help with that so I understand the Wordpress choice (even if I think in the end it will be more time burnt than help).
I touched upon alternatives in the "About" section of the website. Short version - I tried a bunch of them. Note: Not just considered or reviews - actually tried them. Nothing came close to wordpress in being able to produce what I wanted with the effort I had available. Basically I managed to get everything I wanted with 1000 lines of code. I don't believe any of the alternatives could have done that. As for being "messy" - they all are based in a similar combination of the tools mentioned above. Bottom line I just don't think any of the other alternatives would have come close to this.
I wouldn't have even considered the alternatives you did consider, but I think it's because of different backgrounds (I don't know Perl nor RVSiteBuilder and Php alone is too low level indeed). I think personally I would have gone with Django/Python, RoR/Ruby or I would have even tried CPPCMS/C++, but all these solutions imply a development that I guess you didn't have the time for so as I said I can understand going with Wordpress. Even if I think it might be problematic on the long term/evolution of the tool. All this is side comment of course, sorry if it don't help.
- the library list by category is empty for me (I see a page with header and all the theme but no content);
I added the "About this website" to explain the above. It has also a place for comments and discussion. My intent was that this be a place for gathering this type of feed back.
I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean here: Do you mean that I should report these kinds of comments on the "About" page? It's a bit "hidden" but ok if I understood correctly ok I'll do that next time.
- if I click on a library name in the alphabetical library list, I end up in a "Library Submission" page which have all the fields pre-filled with the library information but still modifiable. It is not clear to me if this is a voluntary hack to display these info without having to implement another page or if it is just a bug and it should have been another page. In any way; the "Library Submission" title and the writable fields makes it seems buggy.
It's a deliberate choice to reuse code and forms. The form is updateable by the author and read only for everyone else. This saved considerable code and I would be loath to change it. But I'm willing to entertain suggestions to make the intent more obvious and make it seem less buggy.
Ok then my suggestion to fix the perception with minimal efforts would be: when the reader is not the author (read-only access to the page) 1. lock all fields in read-only mode (so that it's visible/clear and people can't write into them at all); 2. remove the "Library Submission" title or replace it by something else ("Candidate Library?") (for clarity that this page is not intended to be a library submission form for the reader to fill) I think these changes should be enough, but I'm not sure if it's easy to implement from your current code. If it was just some javascript I could have helped but I think it's better done on the server side (where the access rights is known).
- having the front page text stretch all the width of the screen makes it very hard to read, both because it makes too long lines and because there is no space between the left and right border and the text itself. This is against text ergonomic "rules" and I should point that even scientific studies seem to suggest that too long lines makes it hard to read.
This is my personal preference. Personally it drives me crazy to have he web pages not fit on browser window. This way I can just adjust the window to the size and shape I like and the text is (almost) layer out perfectly. Just in case, I don't believe that asking the user to change his window's size to read that particular website is reasonable.
By the way this problem is also apparent in a lot of Boost libraries documentation and I do still have a hard time with reading most boost doc because of this.
again - I love the way the boost documentation adjusts to the current window size. I think ALL web pages should work this way. I just don't see anyway to reconcile these points of view.
I don't see a way either and therefore I will not argue more on this, it's not useful a the moment.
In any way, thanks for the hard work; I know it's not easy to setup this kind of tool correctly.
LOL - I'm going to ignore the implication that it's currently setup incorrectly.
I am very sorry, I might have badly formulated my sentence: it was not my intent at all to imply that it's incorrectly implemented or anything close, I just meant that it's always hard to make such tool, whatever that means, in particular when you have limited resources. I wanted to exress my gratitude and that I wish I could help in more productive ways (I've been in similar positions and it's not always pleasurable to have a list of critics instead of thanks for benevolent work).