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Redesigning Central Michigan Life – design questions

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10:43 pm
July 30, 2009


CMLife

Member

posts 16

Hey everybody,

I am Brian Manzullo, the fall editor-in-chief of Central Michigan Life, CMU's student newspaper. I'm one of the latest people to go on board with the CoPress transition, and today I began building the new cm-life.com.

While I have worked with a little bit of CSS and PHP in the past, I'm still learning it (especially today), so I'm bound to have some questions along the way.

I will start with this one: I am using the Gazette theme from Woo Themes. I am looking for a way for my subcategories to drop down to another horizontal menu, much like you see at freep.com, if you were to highlight "Sports" and see the different teams. Obviously, this is a PHP coding trick, and I'd rather see if anyone knows an easy way to do this rather than a few hours of trial-and-error.

If anybody can help, I would GREATLY appreciate it. Thank you so much!

-Brian

3:31 am
July 31, 2009


William P. Davis

Veazie, Maine

Admin

posts 65

Post edited 7:36 am – July 31, 2009 by William P. Davis


Brian-

First of all, welcome!

The trick is actually done through Javascript, but it is not one I would recommend. Javascript slows your site down, bogs down your computer and in general creates a worse viewing experience. I can't tell you how many times I've been foiled by nasty javascript. If you must, you can modify something like this.

Good luck with your redesign — you'll love WP, I'm sure.

wpdavis.com | Editor in Chief, The Maine Campus | Associate, CoPress | will@copress.org | 207.660.5342

12:32 pm
July 31, 2009


Daniel Bachhuber

Admin

posts 102

Here's a good tutorial on how to do it with (mostly) CSS. If you want to do it for your sectional navigation, then the tutorial might require some tweaking (I'm not sure that WP will wrap the sub-elements in span like the tutorial wants).

Good luck!

9:46 pm
July 31, 2009


Chris Ullyott

Fullerton, CA

Member

posts 66

Brian, this is exactly what we're trying to do in Fullerton. We think the MNDaily does it very nicely. Miles and Andrew of CoPress suggested we not use it, but, I still think it looks much better than drop-downs. I say it's worth a shot. 

Chris Ullyott | Daily Titan, CSU Fullerton | cullyott@dailytitan.com

1:47 am
August 4, 2009


Daniel Bachhuber

Admin

posts 102

The website is looking really, really slick right now. It's taken a number of steps forward since you first started; nice work. I have a few of points of constructive feedback and then a bunch of ideas to run past you to see if they stick.

On the article page, I notice that you have the email at the bottom of the post. Ideally, you shouldn't be embedding those in the body content, but rather exposing the author's email address (if you want people to access it) with WordPress. There's a function you can use to get the author's email address and show it in the template. Additionally, instead of placing this at the bottom of the article, I'd focus on having an author bio section near the top that includes the name, their Twitter account, a link to the most recent posts, etc.

Two more things for the article page. I think the font color you're using, although it fits nicely with the color scheme you have, isn't very readable. I'd make it darker and potentially a bit larger. Additionally, you shouldn't have the location in the body content either. If you want to keep the location associated with the article, then there's a cool plugin called GeoPress for that. What you do is store all of the locations as custom fields associated with the post, and then it will allow you to generate maps of all your posts, etc. By keeping the metadata as metadata, you can use the aggregate of it as something useful. It's also a simple thing to expose the data if you want it to look the exact same to the end user (although you could also place the article on an inline map, etc.)

Like Joey said, I think you're 80% of the way there with your logo. If I were working on it, I'd drop the tagline from the logo, add it to the title tag for SEO, and come up with something (possibly a secondary logo), that will work for square avatars too.

The home page is coming along nice. I have a couple of ideas to throw at you. One, what do you think about adding the author name and tags to each of the story elements? Two, I think the "What We're Reading" widget could use a bit of padding and rearranging. I might move the author name to the front of the comment, and you could easily add a link to a What We're Reading page (a la this and this).

Ok, time for the more forward thinking ideas. On the Spokesman-Review website, they have navigation at the top called "Quick Links":

The whole idea is to give you ready access to the story you're most likely coming to the website for (i.e. the big stories that day or week). I think it would play well with a student newspaper too, and look and work nicely under the main navigation bar on your website. On the top, you've got the more traditional methods of categorizing news content, but underneath the links are the "trending" topics. Does that make sense? The links would drive either to stories in progress or topical landing pages, and it might even be worthwhile to build a little plugin that arranges and prioritizes the links so that the editor doesn't have to change the WordPress template.

I think you should approach the category pages as landing pages on their own right. Currently, they're formatted more in the blog/chronological format. It would be really cool if each category page had the option to highlight big images at the top, a video, etc. Basically, the nice way that your home page looks should also apply to your category pages.

The final thought is to have a page (which people can choose as their default page when they sign in) which aggregates the stream of all of the activity on the site and in the community. This would include new posts, new comments, tweets from the geographic area, photos recently uploaded to Flickr, etc. and might take a similar design approach to Facebook or the new AnnArbor.com.

Good luck! Looking forward to the continued progress

7:11 am
August 4, 2009


CMLife

Member

posts 16

Daniel,


Thanks a lot for the feedback; I'm at the point where I'm looking for ways to improve on what I have now. I think the building part is pretty much over, aside from tweaking, which I have all this week and the next to do.

I'll take note of the e-mail function, the GeoPress and the font color which, I agree, is a bit too light. I'll probably get on all that today.

I meant to ask you about adding authors and possibly tags to front-page stories. Then again, I don't remember looking too hard for it. I'll let you know if I can't find where to do it.

One thing I know I couldn't figure out was padding the "What We're Reading" section. The entire box, including the header, is in one style, making things a bit complicated. I'm going to see if creating a new style for the text inside the gray box will work. I'm not quite CSS proficient yet; we'll see how that works!

Another question I have: If you look at articles that don't have photos, you'll see a box behind the headline, repeating the headline. How do I get rid of this? I know it has to do with not having a photo, but I'm not sure what to omit in the code.

The forward-thinking ideas, obviously, are things I'll probably work on post-launch. But the category pages, I'd like to try fixing up. I'm assuming that involves coding in archives.php. I may need some help doing that- I'm still working on getting better at PHP and all that!

Thanks again!

8:21 am
August 4, 2009


CMLife

Member

posts 16

Another thing:

The avatar we'll probably use for Twitter will be "CM Life" in the same font format we use for our logo (whether we keep that font or choose a different one) instead of coming up with a new logo strictly for the avatar. CM Life is the recognized brand around Mount Pleasant rather than Central Michigan Life, so it's best we incorporate that in some way. I could do something a little creative with that, possibly.


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