[mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

totoff · 2011-12-03 19:40:40

Destry schrieb:

And if we do some redirecting of the redundant domain names (also talked about before), e.g.,…

textpattern.net -> docs.textpattern.com
textpattern.org -> plugins.textpattern.com

…then we do one better.

second this strongly.

and regarding discussion about design: i remember from my very first visit to the .com site that i didn’t like the logo at all. i found it very backward and the tools shown reminded me to the stone age. this feeling has never fully gone away although in understand the idea behind of “this cms is basically about text”.

however, considering that it is the main represantation of the brand maybe it’s worth rethinking the design …

philwareham · 2011-12-04 16:28:29

Gocom wrote:

Worst things in whole .com layout are the ads (can’t be helped I assume) and some mixed colors (slightly different colored body texts, one #333 and some other shade), mixed fonts, off-balanced cramped “size and more info” under the download button, and all the italic text. Italic serif fonts are not exactly the easiest to read. At the testimonials size rendering starts to become pretty jittery.

OK, I’ve had a revise of the CSS for the Textpattern.com site – I’ve posted it on my server for the moment for viewing (changes are quite subtle so you may want to compare alongside the live homepage):

http://testing2.designhive.com/index.html

Here are some of the improvements…

removed some unused CSS rules and simplified/optimised remaining rules a bit
updated the reset.css to a more modern version
bumped up all font sizes a little
more consistent font sizes, line-heights and font colours
better font stack
prettified the forum topic list
collapsed footer a bit
ran images through optimisation apps to reduce filesizes
removed the blue graduation from various elements – looked a little dated now
balanced some if the layout better
removed italic version of Times New Roman (apart from if used as emphasis)
removed a couple of images where I could recreate the same effect with CSS
fixed the active state of the search button not displaying properly

I’d like make further changes if I had access to the CMS, such as…

remove any inline styling (i.e. on the external links div)
the testimonials are not fixed not fluid heights – which means if too much text it can fall out of the parent box – this could be easily fixed by rewriting a couple of divs and a clear fix
there’s a few inline span tags which you could remove as they were used for redundant styling in the past
a few images could actually be quite easily done as CSS instead, though I’d need to rewrite the HTML a little to accomplish that (i.e. the download box background is currently an image but could easily be CSS with border-radius instead)
maybe with the devs blessing I could change the text in the nav bar items, as many here have suggested much better.more logical wording for that

I could also recreate some of the JPEG as PNG files instead where it would be better – such as the TXP logo – it’s currently a JPEG when it would be better optimised as a PNG.

Nothing serious wrong with it and no disrespect to the original authors, it just some basic housekeeping since the original was written back in 2008 and certain techniques have changed since then.

Let me know if all looks agreeable so far and I’ll send Robert the newer stylesheets and newer image files.

Last edited by philwareham (2011-12-04 16:30:38)

uli · 2011-12-04 18:03:56

The Twitter/Follow lines in the header need a shift upwards of 1-2px. (There’s an unnecesary space between “Twitter” and the colon.)
If the forum social links block had margin-left on the a tags instead of on the images the underlining were a little nicer while hovering these.
Neue Helvetica looks worse here than Arial, sorry.
I very much like the padding-left on the left hand menu items (ul.directory li span.entryTitle a). What about giving padding-left to the #sidebar .reasons so its left edge aligns with the rest?

philwareham · 2011-12-04 19:04:14

The Twitter/Follow lines in the header need a shift upwards of 1-2px. (There’s an unnecesary space between “Twitter” and the colon.)

Vertical alignment now corrected – I can’t do anything about the space before the colon as I don’t have access to the HTML.

If the forum social links block had margin-left on the a tags instead of on the images the underlining were a little nicer while hovering these.

Not sure what you mean by that, underlines look fine to me?

Neue Helvetica looks worse here than Arial, sorry.

I’d had heard there were some dodgy versions of Helvetica Neue around on PC – changed back to Arial grudgingly. Shame because Helvetica Neue is a much better looking font (on a Mac).

I very much like the padding-left on the left hand menu items (ul.directory li span.entryTitle a). What about giving padding-left to the #sidebar .reasons so its left edge aligns with the rest?

The #sidebar .reasons are part of the accordion box so would look strange with no margins – I’ve bumped the yellow background tint a little to compensate.

uli · 2011-12-04 19:35:15

philwareham wrote:

Not sure what you mean by that, underlines look fine to me?

They overlap the images/whole element, beginning at the right edge of the previous element, whereas they should begin right below the leftmost pixel of the image.

I’d had heard there were some dodgy versions of Helvetica Neue around on PC – changed back to Arial grudgingly. Shame because Helvetica Neue is a much better looking font (on a Mac).

I am on a Mac, but I saw in the meantime it’s FF that’s part of the shame ;) Sample below

Thanks, Phil!

Bloke · 2011-12-04 21:00:20

+1 Phil’s version.

I’m sure if you stroked wet in the right places he’d create an account for you on .com to make the other tweaks you mentioned. Be warned we are very very tight on who gets access to the site given that it holds the keys to our official downloads (its not necessarily who has accounts, it’s that each account is another potential way in), so if he rejects your advances don’t take it personally :-p

Last edited by Bloke (2011-12-04 21:01:38)

philwareham · 2011-12-04 21:30:30

Right, I’ve redone all images as PNG files where appropriate (which has trimmed over 100kb for the page) and redrawn the previous/next buttons so they match the rest for consistency. I’ve also fixed the active states of all buttons (the images all had an active state sprite but it was not used in the CSS strangely).

I’ll zip these changes up and send to Robert now.

Regarding access to the .com CMS itself, all I really need are the forms/pages sent to me in a zip to be honest, no need for full access to the system if you’re worried I’ll do a dirty protest on it!

Cheers,
Phil

philwareham · 2011-12-05 20:53:13

I’ve got designer role privileges to Textpattern.com now so I’ll be adding some improvements/modernisations over the next few days.

uli · 2011-12-10 18:02:08

Phil, I just remarked that on the dev blog there’s a shortage of space for the excerpts.

philwareham · 2011-12-10 18:13:08

Oh yeah I see, it’s another one of those fixed height divs with hidden overflow that I’ll need to rip out – the testimonials on the homepage had a similar setup before too. I’ll fix it in due course, thanks for pointing it out.

philwareham · 2011-12-12 17:48:46

uli wrote:

Phil, I just remarked that on the dev blog there’s a shortage of space for the excerpts.

I’ve fixed this issue now. Let me know if you spot anything else.

uli · 2011-12-12 20:15:22

The External Links block appears twice in the left sidebar on Dev Blog.
Oh, I see it’s also on /features, /docs, /support, /about. Even on individual articles, thus probably everywhere except for the home page.

I’d remove the upper one btw.

Last edited by uli (2011-12-12 20:16:03)

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#49 2011-12-03 19:40:40

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#50 2011-12-04 16:28:29

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#51 2011-12-04 18:03:56

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#52 2011-12-04 19:04:14

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#53 2011-12-04 19:35:15

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#54 2011-12-04 21:00:20

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#55 2011-12-04 21:30:30

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#56 2011-12-05 20:53:13

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#57 2011-12-10 18:02:08

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#58 2011-12-10 18:13:08

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#59 2011-12-12 17:48:46

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

#60 2011-12-12 20:15:22

Re: [mention] 2011 WaterAndStone CMS Market Share Report Results

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