Posted by Kim on October 17, 2011, 2:01pm
Welcome to the redesigned RP Repository! To make the transition as easy as possible, I've prepared a number of videos and detailed my design decisions below to help you understand why each choice was made and how it will help us going forward.Design rationale
For many of you, the most controversial change will be that we moved to a fixed width layout. Several reasons motivated this design choice:- Supporting all the different browsers and platforms has me stretched thin. Supporting variant screen sizes was an added burden, exponentially complicating the problem.
- Reading text on ultra wide screens can cause eye strain. It is easier to scan over large chunks of text if it is kept relatively compact.
- It's easier to create slick and highly functional interfaces when they can be made a fixed size.
Most of the other design decisions were made with ease of reading in mind.
The parchment background is lighter and the texture is subtler, to make text stand out better.
I picked Cambria as our main font face because it was specifically designed to take advantage of the capabilities of modern, high resolution monitors to create ultra-smooth easily readable text. I find it especially gentle on my eyes when reading (and RPing!) for long periods of time. If you don't have cambria installed on your computer, it will default to something you do have installed. For most of you, the fallback is going to be Arial, which although quite common also holds up very well in research on ease of reading for dyslexics and fatigued people.
The text size was picked to be restive for the eyes. I know some of you are fans of itty-bitty text, but staring at it for hours and hours will burn your eyes out.
Drop down menus have been added to make navigation faster. However, we've kept our old sub-menus for each section, partially for the benefit of users on touch-screen devices who can't easily "hover" over an element to make the drop-downs appear.
Here's another thing touch-screen users will enjoy, just as much as regular users: We've added support for lazy clicking in a number of areas. For example, take the news page. No more need for finding the little "read more" link. Just click wildly in the general vicinity of a headline.
I moved suggestions and hints to where they will be most useful. For example, instead of randomly displaying suggested friends now and again on the home page, there is a new "recommended for you" way to browse characters. Because when you're browsing characters is the moment you actually do want those suggestions!
Other things that happened during the redesign
- Available widgets are now in their own moveable palette, and can be toggled off while you are editing to save screen space.
- Double clicking a widget will automatically add it to a profile
- On touch screen devices (where double tapping is often used to control zoom and dragging is used to scroll the page), single tapping a widget will add it to the page.
- Increased max password length
- Added "other" gender
- Seperated displaying age from displaying birthday (month & year). You can now set them seperately.
- Made player friends list alphabetically rather than in weird "whatever the database felt like today" order
- Character ties now list alphabetically rather than in weird "whatever the database felt like today" order
- Text editor buttons now show consistently when editing widgets in IE
- You can see your join date on your account info page
- You can see how long you've spent in the chat on your account info page
- In most places, character and player portraits are now clickable, such as on the forums
- Clickable portraits no longer cause misalignment bugs in IE.
- Fixed bugs in "highest popularity" sorting of development tasks.
- Number of votes for new features displays on development log page, for comparing at a glance.
- Character management pages have been cleaned up and reorganized. More icons have been added to reflect true range of possibilities.
- New character relationships: Family and acquaintances, in addition to the old Friend and Enemy.
- Option of adding a note to each character relationship, to augment its perception. For example, if you add Mary as a family member, you may add a note such as "Evil step mother"
- New widget: Character ties. Handles all of the new character relationship types, and the new notes.
- Friend and Enemy widgets were retired (Have been converted into new character ties widgets)
- WoW Widgets are no longer available. The armory has changed the way that it functions, and the old widgets are no longer functional. As it is a massive amount of work to write and maintain a new program to access the armory, retrieve and interpret stats, whether that would be a good use of time is under review. As only approximately 23 characters out of well over 5000 were ever real users of this widget when it worked, I'm thinking it will probably just get retired.
- Notifications have been moved off of the dashboard and given their own page (The home page, for logged in users)
- Notifications are now labelled with which group the activity occured in.
- Notifications can be "filtered" by categories such as a certain group or the topics you are subscribed to.
- Similar events that took place in different groups will no longer be combined by notifications
- Notifications have page numbers, you may look back in time at what your friends have been up to (Up to a month for general notifications, 3 months for groups)
- Appropriate notifications only combine when the events in question happened within 24 hours of each other. They used to combine up to two weeks apart. This should make tracking what your friends are up to on a daily basis much less confusing.
- Sender portrait now appears on private messages, for faster recognition of who is writing to you
- You can no longer block me. A few people tried it after I told them they were breaking the rules, claiming they were being "trolled". Trying to block the admin in an attempt to ignore the rules is just a fast track to being banned.
- Community page sports a new "get involved" box to direct new players to stuff to do.
- Accolade swag code re-factored to allow for awarding unique accolades during special bug hunting events. (More on this tomorrow!)
- Double posts of news comments are now automatically filtered out.
- There is now a page where all topic subscriptions can be viewed and edited at once.
- Added an indication of whether or not you have replied to a private message. Don't know about you, but I often forget what I have written a response to and what is still on my to-do list to get back to.
- Visiting the dashboard while logged out now just prompts you to log in, rather than booting you to the home page. This makes it easier to bookmark the dashboard and have it be your normal point of entry into the site if that is your preference.
- Some HTML5 tags have been integrated into the box model for better search engine readability, but mostly this is ground work waiting to be built on in the future.
- All help articles have been moved into a database, to accommodate a new help search system.
- Help has been turned into a proper section of the site, complete with its own main navigation link.
- Help search engine will slowly start learning how to match the search terms people use with the most helpful articles. Right now it's my wild guesses what search terms people might use.
- Help section got its own friendly URLs
- Added a help page with all the emoticons.
- Added a CSS tutorial for absolute beginners.
- Table of contents is now automatically generated for help pages.
- New forum specifically for asking help questions
- Long titles on group widgets will be shortened for display in the sidebar while editing, to prevent the editing buttons from falling down where they can't be seen. It will have no effect on the final display of your group profile, it's purely to make editing easier.
- BBCode installation has been moved around to make the file system make a little more sense. I only mention this because as it was changed, there's a potential something was broken. So far no evidence of breakage, but if you do find something there is always an accolade in it for you.
- Created custom twitter feed for sidebar. I was getting tired of the ugly styling requirements the normal twitter feed has. This one should integrate with the new look of the site far better.
- Changed title on news comment box from "Leave a comment" to "What do you think?" which feels more inviting. I didn't mention other tiny changes like this, but for whatever reason I'm very fond of this change.
- New news category: Events. All Nerdiday and contest related news posts have been moved there.
- "Dashboard" link on character profiles has been changed to community
- A bunch of other stuff I forgot to write down in the heat of programming.
Epic memberships have been extended by two days to make up for hour and a half of downtime during the install. Thanks for your patience, everyone!
Comments
MORE RUPEES FOR YOU!
@Kim I got a blue rupee! Now I can buy... arrows... um... maybe some milk... bee larva... maybe some lantern oil? Actually that might be 20 rupees per refill...
Either way that's like, so nifty and nerdy. As a growing LoZ nerd, I am pleased.
Also as a side note, it looks like you might've forgotten... um...
's little emote for how to make it on the emoticons page? The super uber "
" mixed with "" one. No no shush I'm not trying to earn more rupees (though I'd love that 
), I just happened to notice that space was blank!
Either way that's like, so nifty and nerdy. As a growing LoZ nerd, I am pleased.
Also as a side note, it looks like you might've forgotten... um...
's little emote for how to make it on the emoticons page? The super uber "" mixed with "" one. No no shush I'm not trying to earn more rupees (though I'd love that ), I just happened to notice that space was blank!
Thank you everyone! It has been a lot of work, but your feedback makes it worth it.
@Copper_Dragon: Yes they are so totally rupees! Good catch, you. They're special accolades being given to people who send in bug reports that help me to get the redesign ship shape in a hurry. I'll be announcing the official bug hunt event tomorrow. 
@Copper_Dragon: Yes they are so totally rupees!
Good catch, you. They're special accolades being given to people who send in bug reports that help me to get the redesign ship shape in a hurry. I'll be announcing the official bug hunt event tomorrow.
All killer, no filler! Gonna have to curl up and read the notes sometime, really like what I see so far!
Absolutely wonderful!
Lovely work 
Another note-- I like how some (all?) of the accolades are what appear to be various colored rupees.
... then again, I've been hooked on LoZ, so that's probably why I'm thinking things.
Either way I like!
... then again, I've been hooked on LoZ, so that's probably why I'm thinking things.
Either way I like!
Glacontour
October 17, 2011
5:55pm
whoah, look at all this new stuff...
eue I'm going to have a great time exploring~
eue I'm going to have a great time exploring~
Gah! It looks terrific! *goes exploring*
*goes exploring*
This is incredible. But everything is so new and shiny, so now I need to rub my face on it all again. This'll take hours, so I'd better get started.
Thanks so much for all the hard work you put in for us, Kim!
Thanks so much for all the hard work you put in for us, Kim!
Holy DIO, everything looks FANTASTIC so far!
So much amazing stuff! You're a godsend, Kim! I can't wait to explore this amazing new RPR!
Ohoh I like the new layout, and the homepage actually has information I care about! (I used to skip it over to go straight to my dashboard 
)
But I am pleased with the new look!
)But I am pleased with the new look!
Oh myyyy. SO MUCH GOING ON!
And now I go to play!
And now I go to play!
It's alive!
MermaidOctober 19, 2011
8:01pm