Posted by Kim on August 8, 2015, 2:02pm
For me, the theme of this year is upgrading and maturing the site to reflect the lessons we've learned in our five years of existence.We're halfway through the year and well on the way! Many of my original objectives have already been accomplished:
- Many tweaks have been made to the small-screen version of the site to make checking the RPR from your phone ever more convenient (Not that this is ever entirely done)
- Live chat via PMs was implemented, and unlocked by our intrepid membership during Epic Week
- The available gender-options for players was expanded beyond male/female/other
- We created an adults only looking for RP forum to help people who are most comfortable playing with people 18+ for whatever reason
- The search feature has been dramatically improved
- Our email system has been made less spammy and dramatically more likely to get where it's going
- I completely rewrote the news post system. You probably don't notice much except that the news has been more active lately -- but from my end, it's SO much easier to keep you up to date!
There's still plenty left on my list, including merging the features of the RP Finder and the Looking For RP forums for the strengths and conveniences of both, adding categorization and organization of characters for people who have lots, and updating the character/player friend systems.
But the biggest project of all is the great template modernization initiative.
Some of our character style templates are now more than five years old, and starting to show their age. In that time, the site has grown and evolved in ways that no one expected. I've learned a tremendous number of lessons about the wildly varying ways people set up their profiles, the different ways people try to view them, and all the many things that can go wrong along the way.You've probably also noticed that this is the first year in which I haven't been expanding the library of free profile templates. That's because before we add any new templates to the site, I want to make certain that all of our existing templates are up to snuff!
I am about to embark on a full revamp of every official character template on the site. This means that some templates may change a bit. A few may be retired, if they have historically not seen much use. All of them will be made mobile friendly (for those who have this feature enabled) and more bug-proof than ever.
Over the past year I've been compiling a checklist of the criterion every template will need to be tested and updated for. If there's some issue you've run into that you don't see listed already, please let me know now so I can be sure to check every single template for it!
The template modernizing checklist
- Does the template's popularity vs. complexity warrant continued supported?
- Does the template have a reasonable maximum width, to prevent eye strain when reading long passages of text?
- Does the text/background get a WCAG AAA rating? http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
- Is it possible to compress the assets such that the TOTAL size of the template download, including CSS, images and fonts is 100k or less? If not, the max cap is 500k.
- Does it look okay with a max length character name?
- Does it look okay with a 3 letter character name?
- Does it look okay with a max length player name?
- Does it look okay with a 3 letter player name?
- Does it look okay when played anonymously?
- With every player/character combination of the above name lengths?
- Do ads interact with the content? If so, fix.
- Do long ads break the page when there is a large image across the top? If so, fix.
- Icon correctly positioned
- Does the character icon look okay when 95 x 95?
- Does the character icon look okay when it is smaller, such as 25 x 25?
- Does it look okay when a vertical rectangle?
- Does it look okay when a horizontal rectangle?
- Does the template look okay when there are no widgets on a page?
- Does the template look okay when there are no pages on the profile?
- Does the template look okay if there is only a super small amount of text on it? (does centering continue to work, for example)
- Does the template look okay if none of the widgets have titles?
- Dropdowns
- Correct colors, proper contrast
- Long page titles wrap correctly
- Does the toolbar menu (across the top) continue to look okay when there are max # of links and max character name length is in use?
- BBcode tested, works and matches theme
- Bold/strong
- italic/em
- BBCode Spoiler
- Ensure spoiler tag works in Basic Info widget
- Ensure links stay hidden inside of spoiler tags
- BBCode Collapse
- BBCode Quote
- BBCode Code
- BBCode sizes (does line-length get screwed up? Does line-height suffer?)
- Youtube embeds resize appropriately
- Vimeo embeds resize appropriately
- Images resize appropriately
- Aligned images stop "floating" and start "stacking" in mobile-sized layouts
- Widgets
- Does the gallery widget look presentable?
- In thumbnail layout?
- In full size layout?
- Does the lightbox continue to work well for mobile users?
- Does a 3-column 10 dot char stat widget break the layout?
- Are the page links (next, previous) on the journal widget positioned in a way that makes sense?
- Do kudos have appropriate space between them?
- Do all widgets look and work okay without a title?
- Does the gallery widget look presentable?
- Does the template work for tablet?
- Including ads?
- Including long menus?
- Including toolbar menu?
- Does the template work for mobile?
- Including ads?
- Including long menus?
- Including toolbar menu?
- Do the windows for kudos, character connections and etc. have correct colors and font sizes?
- Is the CSS well-commented such that a user could examine it and learn something?
Comments
Holy BEANS that is a lot of stuff that goes into a checklist! Even though I've missed the updates to the template list (because I so love new templates), my excitement for the overhaul outweighs it by tons. Good luck in your continued quest to modernize the templates, Kim! I can't wait to see the results. 
Thanks alot kim. Its been over six months since i joined and i wish there was more for us to do to thank you. Any way thank you again kim.
Moki
August 8, 2015
2:31pm