CUNY Academic Commons

Last call for this milestone. Chris, any chance you can create something by, say, the end of this week? I want to prepare for a 1.4 release.

I'd really love to see us do something with this -- Michael, Chris, it would be great to hear your thoughts. Many thanks.

Thanks for this, Michael. I like the pinterest-inspired idea of including a site blurb there. A few thoughts:

1. I had been thinking we could rethink/redesign those gray boxes, which were originally put together by a developer at the last minute. They should be lighter (in feel) and more Web 3.0-ey.

2. Wondering if you could rework that new button a bit -- looks a bit off to me (maybe the color, maybe just try exploring a different concept)

Thanks for your work on this.

Where do we stand on this? Time's a-tickin' for this release.

What do you guys think about using one of these CSS3 buttons for the "Getting Started" block?
http://hellohappy.org/css3-buttons/

I really like the red one, but not red. Maybe the green from our header logo?

I LOVE IT! :-)

I guess with nothing else jumping off the page the "web 2.0" buttons are a little outa place. The clean grey will prob look a lot better.

Dammit, that does look better. :-)

Thanks so much, Ray. If you don't mind playing with this a bit more, can you please put together screenshots showing the following buttons in gray?

Skip
Minimal Indent

many thanks.

Thanks, guys. One question before we move forward/comment: should we consider embedding the login/password fields directly onto the page? You can see an example of that on the OpenLab

Somehow, we didn't have Chris as a watcher on this. Just added him. Chris, please let us know your thoughts.

should we consider embedding the login/password fields directly onto the page?

Out of scope for 1.4. It's too late to be making big functionality changes to the front page. If we want to change something functional, let's move it out of this milestone.

If we want to change something functional, let's move it out of this milestone.

Fair enough.

It looks to me like Michael's proposal would change the look of the page significantly. Michael, can you do a quick mock-up showing what the entire page would look like with the section changed as you've proposed here? Thanks.

What about incorporating Micheal's buttons into Ray's screenshot? I like the idea of keeping the grey boxes, I think it helps breaks up the white space.

I also on board with Matt's suggestion to incorporate the login/password fields in this area, perhaps in a later release.

I like 2 the best.

Michael -- I agree that the text needs to be darker to be readable (thus, only Getting-Started4.png is a realistic alternative). I'll give these another look tomorrow with fresh eyes, but I have to say that right now, the all-white background isn't working for me. As much as I think the gray boxes are a bit leaden, they are effective in delineating sections of the page pretty cleanly. The versions you've done with a white background make the page as a whole look a bit jumbled -- and we have to remember that with the featured widget being revamped, we'll be using photos more in that space, too., which will only add to the visual cacophony. I'm still open to alternatives, but for now, I'm thinking that we should keep at least some version of the gray boxes.

Ray, if you show prototypes of the page with the Skip & Minimal Indent buttons, I'd appreciate it. Many thanks.

Sorry, I wasn't getting the updates on this before. Overall, I do think that buttons are something we need to address overall on the Commons (http://teachingmultimedia.com/commons/buttons/buttons.html) but that will need to wait for the redesign. In the meantime I agree that the grey buttons fit in more with what we currently have and also having some kind of lines or darker areas to separate the 'Getting Started' and 'Featured Post' as their own sections. I would hesitate to use any kind of 3d effect or heavy gradient as it would be inconsistent with the rest of the design.

Thanks very much, Ray. The minimal indent implementation looks good to me, and I like having less padding on the gray headers -- good idea. Chris, the minimal header does contain a bit of a 3D effect; do you think it's incongruous?

The small 3d is fine, as I look at my button page we do some things like that elsewhere in the site. For now I think it's fine to use the good work that's been done and worry about a more general plan for buttons later (and at that point we can look into 3d, gradients etc).

Also, I'm assuming that if you're logged in then it would just show the tour information and link?

Ray, our goal is to finish up this ticket today, so can you implement the minimal indent button and reduced header padding as soon as you can? Many thanks.

Thanks, Ray. Brian, can you tell us how many people visit the Commons with IE6-8? Thanks.

It might not be a bad idea to use the CSS3 Pie anyway. There are probably still a few IE 6/7/8 users out there and as we incorporate more things into the site we'll need that kind of solution anyway. Ray, did you have any thought on the .htc vs the .js implementation? I haven't really looked at it but I'm guessing the .js will be simpler at first but the .htc would be more seamlessly integrated. If they have the .js hosted on one of the Google or Microsoft CDNs then that might help with the download.

Ray, did you have any thought on the .htc vs the .js implementation? I haven't really looked at it but I'm guessing the .js will be simpler at first but the .htc would be more seamlessly integrated.

The advantages and disadvantages for using the JS version are listed here.

If we wanted to use a CDN-hosted version, we would have to go with JS since the .htc method requires the file to be located on the same server.

Thanks for the link. It seems like the .htc solution is better if we can meet the requirements. I didn't realize that you had to reference the behavior in each rule you needed it used. It seems like that would be a good place to use something like SASS as well so you could define the styling for a button with the CSSPie as a mixin and then use it where you needed it without worrying about remembering the behavior reference. Maybe not for now but something to remember when we do an overall redesign.

If we have problems with the .htc then yes a CDN .js version.

Good to hear you prefer the .htc version, Chris, as that was my preferred choice as well!

I've implemented the .htc version on cdev. The great thing about using the .htc version is we can add the IE-specific references n the already-existing ie.css stylesheet! No unnecessary markup in the main stylesheet.

I've tested in IE7 and IE8 and it works.

As for SASS, SASS sounds great but it requires Ruby and I don't believe we should be using such a script. Better to stick to CSS3 conventions when possible.

If there are no problems with the implementation, I will commit these changes.

Great, doing it in the ie style sheet is the way to go. I probably shouldn't have mentioned sass. There are some programs you. An run that will compile it for you and you can have a local terminal run the ruby so that all the server sees is the compiled CSS. But in general I think that is something we can tackle later as part of an overall redesign and reconfiguring of the CSS.

Everything sounds fine onmy end I haven't had a chance to test in ie <9 but I trust you're right.