Navigation of CPAN-Forum

Posted on 2005-02-11 21:16:24-08 by b10m

First of all, congrats with getting this from the ground. I see the potential, especially with RSS feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS? Wonderful! Go teach slashdot ;) But -there's always a "but" coming after praise- the navigation of the posts/threads seems really hard and non-intuitive. I've looked around for a bit now and just find it hard to:

* Read a thread
* Read a single post!

Maybe it's just me, but I guess you may scare people off with this interface. A tree view of the thread might help (indent here and there)? Also the different colors in a single post are not really helpful to get a quick overview IMHO...

Direct Responses: 97 | 110 | Write a response

Posted on 2005-02-11 22:07:02-08 by szabgab in response to 96

Re: Navigation of CPAN-Forum

No, its not just you. I find it hard to read them too.

Now if someone with more visual capabilities would help and create some layout....

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Posted on 2005-02-14 10:30:33-08 by blackbird in response to 96

Re: Navigation of CPAN-Forum

It's not just you, I feel the same. ;-) Looks a bit like a mailing list archive.

BlackBird

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Posted on 2005-02-14 13:18:45-08 by b10m in response to 97

Re: Navigation of CPAN-Forum

I can't help you too much, I'm affraid, but maybe I can give some pointers that would make it easier on the eyes:

* Allow more HTML input (eg (un)ordered lists are really helpful... <strong>?)
* Get rid of the <table>s, layout can be done with <div>s IMHO
* Giving the messages a fixed width (e.g. 100%) will make it look better in case of small posts
* Make the tread more visible (indenting posts)
* Maybe add a "I've read all of these posts", like Perlmonk's "I've checked all of these".
* "in response to \d+" doesn't say much. I don't remember all the post IDs by heart ;)
* Said before: bright hover colors are too bright (My eyes! Aargghhh!)
* I'm not sure how to make the "index"/"home" page better, but maybe just list threads there?

HTH

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Posted on 2005-03-23 19:50:42-08 by howars in response to 111

Re: Navigation of CPAN-Forum

As to what tags to allow in message writing, might i suggest using Markdown. I'm using it within our CMS Application and am really happy with it. I think it covers a large enough subset of html that you wouldn't have to allow html at all, and it outputs valid xhtml.

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Posted on 2005-08-08 10:20:50-07 by danmcb in response to 110

Re: Navigation of CPAN-Forum

my initial impressions too. I have a multilingual site based on perl cgi for content provision; want to add a forum and integrate the membership system. Been looking at phpbb which is good but I'm not crazy about the way it looks, and if it's going to multilingual it will be hell with all those texts embedded in graphics. So considering perl alternatives. This one looks clean and as if it will be not too bad to configure; but I'm just not convinced that the layout will be intuitive enough for a non-techy crowd. hmmm. thinking hard about this. uh? why do I have 2 preview/submit windows? which is active? will this edit make it ... ? let's see ...

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