Welcome to the new GOL website, featuring a pretty much improved everything, woohoo!
This should hopefully be the design we will stick with for some time to come as it scales properly to different screen sizes! While also on a new design there are several noteworthy new features I would like to highlight, I took this time to really get down to basics with the code and re-do some part of it to work better.
Using the excellent Bootstrap library introduced to me by Nate Wright!
Things to note:
* The login/account section is no longer a side block, it's on the "Account" tab on the top navigation. So you can access it from the Games Sales page now too!
* The Games Sales page now has split currencies to make it easier/nicer for different regions to track pricing. As per muntdefems request.
* The Games Sales page now also has a "Download" section to note if it's a DRM Free, Steam or Desura key :)you can also filter by one, two or all three options too! The sales page is now awesome!
* The Forum, G+, Twitter and Facebook links are now in the Community tab on the navbar (we still have the twitter and facebook sidebars though as well).
* The footer advert wasn't previously hidden for anyone who has gone ad-free to show extra support, it now is that was a bug sorry.
* Top Articles section on the right will no longer list an article if it's an editors pick to stop duplication and also increased to 4 as we had more space.
* The images besides articles that are uploaded will keep their filetype now (png, gif, jpg) so it won't hard code to jpg anymore. Which means png's with transparent backgrounds don't turn black now. This should keep cheese happy ;)
* PM's will now go to the correct page after replying.
* Added an "Editors Pick" badge to articles on home and category viewing next to where the category badge is, just looks good to have it on there.
* Added in tagline image uploading for article submissions, please use it and don't link to images in taglines (we don't know how long a random image across the web will stay up).
* After editing a comment it will revert back to the correct page. Thanks to edgley for the request
* You can now preview comments before posting/completing an edit. Thanks to edgley for the request
* If you have donated enough to become ad-free (to support what we do!) you have a badge under your username on article comments :), not sure if "GOL Supporter!" is good text to use or not, what would people prefer, just "Supporter!" ?
* The auto linking of links should work better now.
* You can now select from your User Control Panel home if you want to be emailed when getting a PM. I know some people don't like lots of emails so hopefully it will be useful to some!
* We have an IRC webchat chat up here that autoselects our IRC channel, hopefully that will be useful for a few people, it's how I generally communicate with people nowadays (so if you want to get a hold of me go onto our IRC) since google completely messed up their chat system (changing gchat to hangouts and creating lots of annoying issues...sigh).
For Editors
* When editing a submitted sale it will go back to the submitted section when finished.
* When adding a new article if there is an error with the tagline image it will save the article but not set it to active and send you to the edit article page, so make note as if you just close it thinking it's done we will have disabled articles building up.
* When adding a new article, it auto redirects you to the new article, better than giving that silly message without even a link to it...
* Admins & Editors can now add/edit/delete game sale providers without bugging me to go into the database to add them manually ;)
* You can now set an item to editors pick directly from home page or category view (total not already at 3 of course).
* On article add/edit/preview error - keep selected category instead of it reverting to the original (if you changed it) or back to the first in the list (if there was none). Will stop articles appearing with no category if someone had to correct something before publishing and forgetting to re-select the category. I think cheese had this issue a few times
* Please report all bugs to the bugs forum, create a new topic for each one please! If you notice an articles that don't look right with image sizes and what-not let us know so we can fix it with a correctly sized image (i tried to get a lot of them).
Something no one but me cares about: I improved the templating system so if for some reason a template file can't be found it won't kill the whole script, woohoo!
Also finally a shout out to Levi who is basically the hamster running the server wheel right now, keeping it from crashing, send him some love!
I tried rolling the website out once I've tested all parts of it but nothing is ever bug free! So please do submit bugs!
Hope you all like it, I worked hard on getting it hopefully right!
Thank you to everyone who helped with testing, contributing little tweaks and just being awesome, you all know who you are it's too many to list!
TL;DR - New site, stuff works, stuff got fixed, give me all of your monies. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
This should hopefully be the design we will stick with for some time to come as it scales properly to different screen sizes! While also on a new design there are several noteworthy new features I would like to highlight, I took this time to really get down to basics with the code and re-do some part of it to work better.
Using the excellent Bootstrap library introduced to me by Nate Wright!
Things to note:
* The login/account section is no longer a side block, it's on the "Account" tab on the top navigation. So you can access it from the Games Sales page now too!
* The Games Sales page now has split currencies to make it easier/nicer for different regions to track pricing. As per muntdefems request.
* The Games Sales page now also has a "Download" section to note if it's a DRM Free, Steam or Desura key :)you can also filter by one, two or all three options too! The sales page is now awesome!
* The Forum, G+, Twitter and Facebook links are now in the Community tab on the navbar (we still have the twitter and facebook sidebars though as well).
* The footer advert wasn't previously hidden for anyone who has gone ad-free to show extra support, it now is that was a bug sorry.
* Top Articles section on the right will no longer list an article if it's an editors pick to stop duplication and also increased to 4 as we had more space.
* The images besides articles that are uploaded will keep their filetype now (png, gif, jpg) so it won't hard code to jpg anymore. Which means png's with transparent backgrounds don't turn black now. This should keep cheese happy ;)
* PM's will now go to the correct page after replying.
* Added an "Editors Pick" badge to articles on home and category viewing next to where the category badge is, just looks good to have it on there.
* Added in tagline image uploading for article submissions, please use it and don't link to images in taglines (we don't know how long a random image across the web will stay up).
* After editing a comment it will revert back to the correct page. Thanks to edgley for the request
* You can now preview comments before posting/completing an edit. Thanks to edgley for the request
* If you have donated enough to become ad-free (to support what we do!) you have a badge under your username on article comments :), not sure if "GOL Supporter!" is good text to use or not, what would people prefer, just "Supporter!" ?
* The auto linking of links should work better now.
* You can now select from your User Control Panel home if you want to be emailed when getting a PM. I know some people don't like lots of emails so hopefully it will be useful to some!
* We have an IRC webchat chat up here that autoselects our IRC channel, hopefully that will be useful for a few people, it's how I generally communicate with people nowadays (so if you want to get a hold of me go onto our IRC) since google completely messed up their chat system (changing gchat to hangouts and creating lots of annoying issues...sigh).
For Editors
* When editing a submitted sale it will go back to the submitted section when finished.
* When adding a new article if there is an error with the tagline image it will save the article but not set it to active and send you to the edit article page, so make note as if you just close it thinking it's done we will have disabled articles building up.
* When adding a new article, it auto redirects you to the new article, better than giving that silly message without even a link to it...
* Admins & Editors can now add/edit/delete game sale providers without bugging me to go into the database to add them manually ;)
* You can now set an item to editors pick directly from home page or category view (total not already at 3 of course).
* On article add/edit/preview error - keep selected category instead of it reverting to the original (if you changed it) or back to the first in the list (if there was none). Will stop articles appearing with no category if someone had to correct something before publishing and forgetting to re-select the category. I think cheese had this issue a few times
* Please report all bugs to the bugs forum, create a new topic for each one please! If you notice an articles that don't look right with image sizes and what-not let us know so we can fix it with a correctly sized image (i tried to get a lot of them).
Something no one but me cares about: I improved the templating system so if for some reason a template file can't be found it won't kill the whole script, woohoo!
Also finally a shout out to Levi who is basically the hamster running the server wheel right now, keeping it from crashing, send him some love!
I tried rolling the website out once I've tested all parts of it but nothing is ever bug free! So please do submit bugs!
Hope you all like it, I worked hard on getting it hopefully right!
Thank you to everyone who helped with testing, contributing little tweaks and just being awesome, you all know who you are it's too many to list!
TL;DR - New site, stuff works, stuff got fixed, give me all of your monies. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: titiI would like to see some improvements on the news:
- real date when something was posted, nut things like yesterday/friday/11 hours ago. Place this date prominent in front of the news.
- More obvious separators for each news ( a line?)
- use more of the width for each news. There already is much more space!
The date bit I can work on, I have been meaning to change it so once it's past 24 hours to give it a proper date as I don't like "yesterday" much.
I don't think we need any more separation, you have an image for each article, a bigger header and above it a line, personally I don't see why we need even bigger separation, is it that big an issue to differentiate between articles? If it is then I can look at doing something else but speaking personally I don't see a problem, does any else?
The width is staying as it is, it auto adjusts for screen size and tables and mobiles I don't want to make it any bigger on the desktop as I think it fits quite nicely right now, unless others agree?
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Alex V.Sharp Jun 19, 2013
Quoting: liamdaweThe width is staying as it is, it auto adjusts for screen size and tables and mobiles I don't want to make it any bigger on the desktop as I think it fits quite nicely right now, unless others agree?The width is good as it is because our eyes get tired quicker if they have to follow too from one side of the screen to the other all the time. The auto-sizing for small resolutions is a great thing.
As far as width is concerned, the only thing I have a problem with currently is that a video embed gets stretched so much. Besides that, an interesting idea for future site development would be a column-like articles layout for extremely big resolutions.
I believe you should start a new 'Suggestions & Bugs' thread to accumulate input for next year. :P
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