Talk:Main Page v2

Page editability

• Austin 09:23, 16 March 2006 (EST): Some thoughts on making this and other pages normal user editable. Having started to play with the site-wide css, that seems like the most logical way for controlling the display. If we could convert all the formatting to use css (instead of tables), that would make it much more easy to control in one place the general appearance of many pages. Secondly, it would make the source of the front page much cleaner. I don't know if there's any issues right now with us assuming that everyone will be using the monobook skin, but I doubt we want to support multiple skins right now. Another idea: instead of having a long front page with everything on it, it might make sense to have a Labs page with all the labs and then just include it from the main page. This will allow us to link directly to the Labs page if we want and it'd be easier to tell people to add their labs to that page. The same for other categories. In fact, if we want to go even one step farther, we could have a page per school, include that from the Labs page, which gets included into the main page.
• Jennyn 10:11, 16 March 2006 (EST): Creating individual pages is a good idea to keep source code neat and consistent, however, I really like that all the information is packaged on one page. Navigating through multiple pages is sometimes tedious, and it's fun to be able to see everything at once. I may have misunderstood your idea, however, a possible sample on Main_Page_v2 might help us get a grasp of what you'd like to implement? I'm not very familiar with css, but if it makes code neater and easier, I'd like to give it a try!
• Austin 11:03, 16 March 2006 (EST): ok I removed all font elements from v.2 page and put it into css. It's not exactly the same as the original but it's close.
• Austin 12:01, 16 March 2006 (EST): For the other thing of splitting out into separate pages, we could then protect the main page, and prevent things like this from happening: http://openwetware.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&curid=1&oldid=26251

Community News Module

• Jennyn 17:37, 15 March 2006 (EST): I've added a toolbar and incorporated the Community News to the main table. Let me know what you think .
• RS 19:41, 15 March 2006 (EST): What about (1) moving the community news section above the Resources and Support sections since that is the part that will be changing more rapidly and (2) swapping the resources and groups section. Personally, I care more about the resources on OWW than the groups, but perhaps that's just me. I am just trying to put the most important stuff towards the top of the page so that people don't have to scroll to see it. Also, although I like the icons for getting started, community portal etc. I think they are a bit light in color. Perhaps a dark outline of the icons would make them stand out more?
• RS 19:51, 15 March 2006 (EST): Also why have a home button on the main page? Or are we using the same header on several pages? I would rather delete the home icon and link and make the remaining ones bigger and possibly aligned within the columns. And we might want dark blue lines above and below as with the highlights. Also, I should say that I am not entirely convinced that the Meta section should be removed from the Main Page. I kind of think that section is more important than the banner we request that people put on their home pages. I feel like the strong OWW supporters (i.e. those willing to put the banner on their homepage) will find it off the OpenWetWare:Community Portal. Feel free to ignore these suggestions of course!
• BC 20:11, 15 March 2006 (EST): I agree, I'd prefer to see Meta section stay. Maybe the horizontal "Join OWW" logo could be put into the default Skin to the left of the "Powered by Mediawiki" logo, that way it would show up on every page while not being intrusive.
• BC 20:11, 15 March 2006 (EST): I would prefer not to put community news higher up, my personal feeling is that it isn't updated sufficiently regularly to keep it interesting since its done manually and I think that its important function can be done by the highlights section.
• BC 20:16, 15 March 2006 (EST):I agree with Reshma's points regarding the toolbar. I also wonder if these links aren't better off staying on the sidebar. If we could make the sidebar prettier or more prominent I think that would be preferrable to adding more text to the page itself. My general preference is to minimize the amount of code we have wherever possible. If we could get those little icons on the sidebar that would be sweet, they're rather cute:)
• Austin 21:16, 15 March 2006 (EST): I added some of the green icons to the sidebar. If we can get icons for them all, that might look cool. Either follow the css code in MediaWiki:Monobook.css or revert it.
• Jennyn 21:53, 15 March 2006 (EST): All these sound good. This trial was just an attept to address the following requests:

1. moving the new section so that it can be seen.
2. doing something about the about section because it is exactly what the spill on the main page says.
3. I personally wanted to make some cute icons that can be used for the navigation bar. And now that I know we can make icons for the nav. bar, I'll make icons for those! Yeah!

More formatting changes

• tmt 17:43, 14 March 2006 (EST): What about changing the color of the font as per JenCC? Do we want to do this? And do we want to replace the OWW icon in the corner with the vertical shaking hands DNA? I realize that this probably has to be done on all pages at once...
• Kathleen 17:48, 14 March 2006 (EST): Looks good to me. I say we go with this and make the other changes as we see fit/figure out how to do them. Also, is Jen CC. still tweaking with the logo or is this the final thing? We may not want to do anything too fancy if it's going to be a pain to do it again with the finalized logo.
• RS 18:22, 14 March 2006 (EST): I've pulled Ty's and Kathleen's comments up to the top so that people would see them. In terms of the font color, I don't feel strongly either way. And we should definitely replace the icon in the corner with the vertical shaking hands emblem. But I think Kathleen is right, we want to wait til the final iteration until we do. I know that Tom added a few more comments to the OpenWetWare:Logo and Promo Poster Discussion but I am not sure if the logo is essentially frozen at this point. I'll defer to Ty on this one.

Post new color scheme

In favor:

• Jasonk 15:44, 14 March 2006 (EST): Looks great. I agree with Reshma about highlights bar.
• RS 15:46, 14 March 2006 (EST): I like it too. Though I personally don't think we need the bar saying highlights. I think it is self-explanatory. Probably a thin blue line there is a good idea though just to divide things up.
  • Jennyn 15:51, 14 March 2006 (EST): I deleted the Highlights part of the bar. I originally put it there because Barry mentioned that new users might not know what that is, so if any confusion arises, we can always put it back.
• Jgritton 15:54, 14 March 2006 (EST): I like it also. I put the description in bold since it was a bit hard to read the blue text on a white background.
  • Jennyn 16:03, 14 March 2006 (EST): Jeff, I changed the color to the purple, bolded the first word, and the font to Tahoma. I think it is easier to read now. Revert back if anyone disagrees.
• Smeister 17:23, 14 March 2006 (EST): Looks great! Excellent job, guys! Can't wait to have this as the front page - it is getting me all excited even though I did not even contribute! :)
• tmt 17:20, 14 March 2006 (EST): I like it. Is there any way to add some white space between the columns? JenCC told me that she feels that this space is very important, and I agree that it does look a lot better (see here). Also, how hard is it to change the skin (or whatever) so that the space around the page is blue like in JenCC's design?
  • Jennyn 17:35, 14 March 2006 (EST): I added the space between the modules. I'm not sure how to add them just between the columns, though. And if anyone has access to change the skin, let us know!
  • tmt 17:43, 14 March 2006 (EST): What about changing the color of the font as per JenCC? Do we want to do this? And do we want to replace the OWW icon in the corner with the vertical shaking hands DNA? I realize that this probably has to be done on all pages at once...
• Kathleen 17:48, 14 March 2006 (EST): Looks good to me. I say we go with this and make the other changes as we see fit/figure out how to do them. Also, is Jen CC. still tweaking with the logo or is this the final thing? We may not want to do anything too fancy if it's going to be a pain to do it again with the finalized logo.
• Jennyn 17:55, 14 March 2006 (EST): When I get a go that this is JenCC's final logo, I'll change it to this and then we can continue to modify it as we need to (i.e. the current emblem needs to be removed). Can we add the new emblem to all the other pages and not the main page?
  • Jennyn 18:06, 14 March 2006 (EST): Nevermind, I was too excited and just changed it. Plus, there's a large consensus for posting. If we have any other revisions, they can be made accordingly.
• BC 20:22, 15 March 2006 (EST): I like the new color scheme including the blue of the default Skin. I really like the way the corner logo blends from white to blue. My only concern is that the blue can clash with the color's people use on their group pages. Here are some options to deal with this, not sure what is best.
  1. "We're biologists, we don't care if colors clash."
  2. Make the blue "less blue" so it blends in better with group page colors.
  3. Stick with the current color since it looks nice and let groups modify their color if they are concerned about the clash.

Oppose:

Old Design

• I really, really like this design. Although, I would probably want to wait on popping labs into sepearte university pages until there are enough to warrant it. MIT probably has enough, but everyone else is being relegated to a university page without a community to support that page. I think while we can maintain one "community space" for listing all the labs we should do it, when it becomes too cumbersome then we should go to listing universities, when that becomes too cumbersome... it will be a good problem to have. --JK

• Rather than linking to Labs:University_Name, is there a problem with just linking to University_Name? This maybe makes more sense if the page has more than just labs listed on it. --Devin
  • I agree Devin. You should feel free to make these changes yourself. --Sri Kosuri 22:13, 20 December 2005 (EST)
  • removed the 'Labs:' except for the UChicago one for now, since I noticed that Devin had that deliminator in other pages as well --JK