Community Site changes

[#1]

Quote

Influence them to make it fully CSS-driven for the styling, then the world is your tablecloth

Yup, agreed

[#2]

You could have the tablecloth however you like, even pink (would match your trainers)
If it was fully CSS, then I'd contribute some styles based on what people would like - would lighten the load off of the PlusNet web devs a bit I think. Plus I have far too much time on my hands.

[#3]

I think wordpress makes that a bit of a PITA, but we'll try.

[#4]

Shouldn't do, from first glance it's all CSS-driven already. The only hardcoded styling used is stuff that PlusNet have used for your own personal changes (which could be chucked into a stylesheet and called just the same).

[#5]

Wordpress does make bits of it a PITA as it hardcodes some stuff in non-template files

[#6]

everything in *this* wordpress theme is controlled with one stylesheet, except for the odd css for the plugins.
its a pretty decent templating system they have - once the html was stripped out of the source and used in the templates.
which we're trying to do with SMF but that is a massive PITA!!
So the possibility to change the wordpress part of the community site with some css is there, just needs an interface. If you have a stylesheet to try on it mike, send it through to colin and we'll see how it looks. It will just need to follow the code structure we use, which to be honest, isn't the best it could be. but its good enough.

I reckon the design looks great, it's an efficient way to show all the news sources we have so far, and it's not overbearing in the slightest. Currently it takes a few too many clicks than necassary to find all the other blogs we have.
I think the more we've added to the design we have currently, the more its strained and become ugly. But this looks like a much more extendable layout.
It would be good to get the list of blogs under the categories, and maybe identify which blogs the posts are coming from on the left with a link straight through to that particular blog.

[#7]

Quote from: mitch

It would be good to get the list of blogs under the categories, and maybe identify which blogs the posts are coming from on the left with a link straight through to that particular blog.

Ah, we haven't explained this bit properly internally or externally
We are going to merge all of the different blogs we have and categorise them properly and use the tagging features in wordpress 2.3 properly.  This means that all posts across the blogs will get front page space, but 'innovation' will exist as a category so is still accessible as a single link.

[#8]

Quote from: mitch

So the possibility to change the wordpress part of the community site with some css is there, just needs an interface. If you have a stylesheet to try on it mike, send it through to colin and we'll see how it looks. It will just need to follow the code structure we use, which to be honest, isn't the best it could be. but its good enough.

Do you mean if I have a stylesheet for Wordpress or SMF? I have three for SMF so far, but have only been able to test it on a few pages so far so it's probably incomplete. You can see Wordpress has some pretty versatile theming options if you check http://www.wpthemesfree.com/. I'll start working on some for Wordpress when I get a spare minute, things have been pretty hectic this end the past couple of days.

[#9]

Quote from: MikeWhitehead

Do you mean if I have a stylesheet for Wordpress or SMF?

Wordpress, as we could just drop them into the current theme to see how they look.

[#10]

Got none just now mate. Is the one you guys have just made any different coding-wise to the standard wordpress install? because if it is then any styles I came up with would need to work around those coding changes.

[#11]

There's no standard install to code around, unless you mean the default theme.
We have a custom theme for our wordpress part of the site, you would need to develop your stylesheet to work with those elements, just vew source to see how it's built and either; override the current stylesheet or create a new one.