Post subject: NESVideos Site Redesign Contest
Joined: 5/3/2004
Posts: 1203
The official NESVideos Site Redesign Contest* is underway! Bisqwit was kind enough to provide us with a skeletal version of the site's PHP and stylesheets to experiment with. Here are the files. Casual web developers will want to focus on .css, the stylesheet for NESVideos. Even restricted to modifying just the stylesheet, virtually limitless possibilities abound. The CSS Zen Garden is a good example of what is possible with just a stylesheet. For those of you unfamiliar with CSS, or those of you requiring a refresher, check out this CSS tutorial. More advanced web developers may want to experiment with layout_api.php, the core script that renders the site. If you aren't familiar with PHP, this PHP tutorial may be useful, though you really don't need to understand PHP to change the layout of the HTML that is generated by the script. Here are a couple of quick pointers that will be sufficient for most of you to modify the code:
  • Use echo and print to write HTML to the page that the user actually sees. For these purposes, the commands are identical, and it doesn't matter which one you use.
  • Whatever HTML you want to write to the page should be enclosed in single or double quotes. For these purposes, it doesn't really matter which ones you use.
  • If the HTML you write has a double quote in it, you probably want to enclose it in single quotes. If the HTML you write has a single quote in it, you probably want to enclose it in double quotes. That way you don't have to use fancy escape characters to remind the PHP interpreter not to misunderstand you!
  • You can join multiple strings in one echo or print command with commas.
  • If you place # or // at the beginning of a line, it is ignored.
  • Like C and Java, end everything with a semicolon.
Example PHP
echo '<div class="header">NESVideos</div>';
print "Bisqwit's Site", " is the best!";
#echo 'this will not display because of the hash symbol';
For those of you that don't have PHP enabled webservers, you will need some way to test the changes you make. For Windows, this standalone PHP interpreter will allow you to do just that. Lastly, the NESVideos site is friendly, compact, and functional. Whatever changes you make, try to keep that essence intact. If you come up with a design of particular interest, simply post a link to the modified files, and possibly a screenshot for easy viewing. *Bisqwit welcomes your creative output, but makes no representations, express or implied, regarding the use of contest submissions in the actual site, now, or at any later date. Translation: this is just some cockamamie scheme I dreamed up; Bisqwit doesn't necessarily have the time or desire to modify the site's design, though I bet if someone comes up with something really nice, he won't be too hard to convince ;) .
Editor, Active player (297)
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What xebra said. Since xebra's post, I updated the files to more closely imitate what the main page module does.
Joined: 5/3/2004
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The stylesheet no longer seems to be notepad friendly.
Editor, Active player (297)
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Don't use notepad. It's a bad editor, severely lacking in features. (And no, I haven't changed anything. I have always used the standard linefeed, not carriagereturn + linefeed, to express new lines in unix files. Which Notepad doesn't cope with.)
Player (206)
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But you should be friendly to everybody!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 11/15/2004
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I do all my web coding in Notepad. When I want a new line I press Enter, and that's the way I likes it!
TASing or playing back a DOS game? Make sure your files match the archive at RGB Classic Games.
Former player
Joined: 3/19/2004
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If you insist on using notepad, just open it in something else, then have it save using Windows line breaks.
Banned User
Joined: 3/10/2004
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Location: Finland
Using a more feature-rich text editor is a good idea. Things like syntax coloring and autoindentation are not simply pretty candy but they really are useful and make coding easier. Naturally other powerful features (such as search&replace supporting regexp) are a plus. The most advanced text editors will show you in real-time if you have a syntax error. It saves you a lot of trouble, really.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Very cool. :) I'll be doing some of this later. Too bad I never get to do any HTML layouts at work, so it's been a while since I made any (and I'm totally unsure if I want to figure out the technical layout of the site's PHP), but I'll free some time for this during the weekends.
Editor, Active player (297)
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No takers?
Joined: 11/22/2004
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Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I haven't worked on this yet because I haven't had any good ideas for it yet. I want to do something for the site, but I don't want to make it image-intensive. But what the future holds, no-one knows!
Player (36)
Joined: 9/11/2004
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I've been busy. However, I do want to give this a shot.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day, Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Former player
Joined: 6/25/2004
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Location: Maine
I'll see if I can give it a shot after I finish a site translation project, but I can guarantee that someone is going to finish this in two days, send it in, and BAM! Done before I even get to start.
Player (206)
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Do we have to actually enter the contest and make full pages to contribute, or can we just make general suggestions about what would work best too?
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Editor, Active player (297)
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You can always throw ideas without writing any code, but the ideas should be reasonable and implementable at least.
Editor, Active player (297)
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Contribution was practically non-existing. I adjusted the stylesheet today a bit. Despite my attempts, it looks horrid, but perhaps it gives ideas for more skilled designers?
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Okay it looked too horrid. Reverted into a middle form of the old and new.
Tub
Joined: 6/25/2005
Posts: 1377
true, not much contribution in here. I can't say I like the new design, although I'm probably just used to the old one. But, since content > design, and the content is good and easiely accessible, I wouldn't worry about it.
m00
Former player
Joined: 4/16/2004
Posts: 1286
Location: Finland
I can't say I'm a fan of the new look either. The box in which the recent additions are on the main page looks somehow very crowded. The font in the panel to the left looks worse and it disturbs me that the panel doesn't continue to the bottom of the page (probably just me). In my IE browser at work the movie pages are too "long" and make the screen scroll to the right a lot, although I'm not sure if this has been the case before as well. But yeah, Tub said it. I'm probably just used to the old one. EDIT: Oh, but I forgot to mention how much I like those new headings. !!! and !! look much better now.
Joined: 5/22/2006
Posts: 58
Location: Denver, CO USA
is this still kinda going on? i'd like to give this a shot...
What would Mr Belvedere do? Probably eat some butter.
Joined: 5/3/2004
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It's always going on.
Joined: 5/22/2006
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nice, i'll play around a little bit this weekend then, see what i come up with
What would Mr Belvedere do? Probably eat some butter.
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Hmmm, I was just wondering is there a way to merge assimilate the forum into the site nicely. In that case, when selecting a particular submission/movie, the discussion can take place there, rather than a discussion in the forum which links to the site... Just my 2 cents... because I realised that ever since I registered with the forum, I hardly refer back to the Front Page.
Truncated wrote:
Truncated is the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man. -- xoinx
Editor, Active player (297)
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xoinx wrote:
Hmmm, I was just wondering is there a way to merge assimilate the forum into the site nicely. In that case, when selecting a particular submission/movie, the discussion can take place there, rather than a discussion in the forum which links to the site... Just my 2 cents... because I realised that ever since I registered with the forum, I hardly refer back to the Front Page.
I've considered that too, but in my opinion, it seems to contain too big obstacles. 1. Assume submission discussions are carried out on the submission page. - It is not smart to duplicate the discussion forums, possibly in a way that uses two completely different user interfaces. The rest of the forums should also be merged into the site. 2. There's not enough room for everything on the screen. The forums already take a lot of room on the page, and without radical redesigns, it wouldn't fit into the nesvideos site layout. 3. People oppose redesigns.
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Bisqwit wrote:
xoinx wrote:
Hmmm, I was just wondering is there a way to merge assimilate the forum into the site nicely. In that case, when selecting a particular submission/movie, the discussion can take place there, rather than a discussion in the forum which links to the site... Just my 2 cents... because I realised that ever since I registered with the forum, I hardly refer back to the Front Page.
I've considered that too, but in my opinion, it seems to contain too big obstacles. 1. Assume submission discussions are carried out on the submission page. - It is not smart to duplicate the discussion forums, possibly in a way that uses two completely different user interfaces. The rest of the forums should also be merged into the site. 2. There's not enough room for everything on the screen. The forums already take a lot of room on the page, and without radical redesigns, it wouldn't fit into the nesvideos site layout. 3. People oppose redesigns.
1) I don't have much expertise in this, so I probably can't comment. But I can understand how painful it is to allow duplicated content in different interface. But actually the colour scheme and interface of the forum already suits the site... is there a need to change it? Maybe just using iframes to allow the user to see comments together with the submission? But frames are not very browser friendly... so it isn't the best solution I guess. 2) What about the tabbed interface introduced? It could be under one of those tabs in the published video page. This tabs can also be introduced to the front & submission pages for the viewer to swtich between the main page as well as the rest of the forum discussions... would this be more feasible? 3) LOL, I still remember the hoo-ha after the forum page was changed to the double column layout. But I guess after a while, when people get used to it, it should be alright, just like the forum now :)
Truncated wrote:
Truncated is the most fiendish instrument of torture ever devised to bedevil the days of man. -- xoinx