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New homepage

Added by looking_for freedom over 9 years ago

Hi again. After some weeks of speding all of my free time in learning Wordpress (installing on a free hosting, setting up, etc), and in fighting with CSS styles, today I have completed the draft for a new replicant homepage that I proposed at other thread . The page is available at:

http://replicant-web-dev.comlu.com/rwd/

I have used Firefox to develop it, so please use preferably Firefox to visit it first. Then, if you have other browsers, try them and tell me any differences you find, in order to fix them.

The page can look easy to do, but it has required a lot of work. First I used the default "twentyfourteen" theme, but I saw it didn't fit all the requirements I imagined, so I created a child theme, "twentyfourteen-replicant", that reuses the default theme and makes some changes. For example, adds the header widget area, and customizes a lot of CSS styles, to get a clear, easy to read, and coherent look&feel.

I already knew the Inkscape program, so I could adapt the logo easily to the page style. The name of the proyect is now integrated into the logo, with an easy-to-read typeface and format, saving space, that allows to put the forum comments at the header, as the heart of a paticipation centered homepage.

Two sidebars (left and right) allow the dynamic content to flow over the page, as two water cascades. The left one contains last development and wiki changes, and the right one contains last donations (the Trisquel homepage gave me the idea of showing donations). Additionally, both of them contain static information (links), useful for first-time visitors. Those links reuse information already available at replicant page, but probably some of those pages will require some rework, or the creation of new pages.

News are kept as the center of the replicant homepage. I think they are useful as they are, for both first-time and frequent visitors.

For the donations I have used a feed from a page that shows last money receptions for any bitcoin account, I just entered the bitcoin account that appears at the FSF Replicant page. The feed shows receptions in BTC units (I bet it is "bitcoint" units), and date. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

Compared to the Trisquel page, I think the draft is nicer, the information is better distributed, flows over the page. I see the Trisquel page as too rigid, all information in it seems to have the same importance. Of course this is a draft, it can be adapted to other tastes different than mine, but I think it is a good start.

I we decide to put it into production, the copy to the replicant website will be easy: Just upload the child theme to the Wordpress themes directory, activate it, and create the widgets (I will pass you the config of them).

Well, I'm tired today after so much work, so I'm going to rest a bit... I hope you like my contribution. See you tomorrow.


Replies (4)

RE: New homepage - Added by looking_for freedom over 9 years ago

Any feedback?

The new homepage took me a lot of time and effort, so I would like to hear something from you.

RE: New homepage - Added by Paul Kocialkowski over 9 years ago

Thanks a lot for your great work! I have given this some thoughts and while your proposal is nice, it doesn't exactly fit what I had in mind for the Replicant home page. I wanted something more like Trisquel, that would be clearly separated from the blog. Using Wordpress as engine for a homepage doesn't make it very flexible either.

On your proposal, the community-oriented elements still don't take a lot of space and it still looks like a blog, not a homepage.

I spent some time a few days ago designing a proper home page for the project: http://armstrong.paulk.fr/aldrin/~paulk/replicant/www.replicant.us/
It really makes it easy to find the things that matter, remains clear and gives place to the community.

Let me know what you think about it. It's going to be the default home page sometime soon while the blog will stay the same but will be moved to blog.replicat,us

Thanks again for your work and the concepts you introduced!

RE: New homepage - Added by Paul Kocialkowski over 9 years ago

Note that the website is not up all the time as it's currently hosted on my development machine. Please let me know what you think about it.

RE: New homepage - Added by Paul Kocialkowski over 9 years ago

As you probably have noticed already, the new website is up and running. Thanks again for your input!
If you're interested, the source code for the website is hosted at: https://gitorious.org/replicant/website

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