Website issues

[kit]

Why does the home page show a blog and when I click on the blog link, you get a different blog? And why does this different blog appear inside a frame? Isn't showing a different website in a frame of another website bad practice?

When I click on the AS3 multicore link the content is identical to the AS3 Standard page.

[puremvc]

Thanks for calling attention to the AS3 MultiCore link, it's going to the right page now.

In regards to showing a different website in a frame, is your browser having issues rendering any of the content properly?

They are all sites in the puremvc.org domain. The top-level Joomla site really is just meant to pull them together and publish the occasional news item.

Wordpress is just a better blog than Joomla. The trac sites that make up the Manifold project come free with the repositories for each project. The forums are SimpleMachines. The main site is good for publishing news and pointing to all the resources that's about it.

Sure it'd be great if all this stuff were integrated and all the functionality came from a single system. But one thing is for sure, it looks a lot better than when I started the site with HTML written in notepad

-=Cliff>

[justsee]

Hey Cliff,
it's definitely a stellar effort you've put in, but I would just +1 having the forum not open in a frame! Just not the done thing nowadays and has had me right click -> this frame -> open in new tab with each visit to the site . Can't bookmark either (and there's lots of good posts to del.icio.us!)

Very minor usability issue though!

[puremvc]

Thanks, and I do realize that it's a bit of a pain right now. I'm struggling with the framing stuff. I need to find someone who has the time and knows Joomla, SMF and Trac enough to do a unified template so that the other sites would not need to be framed.

For now, to return to just forums, you can just bookmark http://forums.puremvc.org.

-=Cliff>

[zydecode]

just skimmed through this thread.. I have the same usability issues raised here - and I have experience skinning/designing around Joomla, SMF, Trac and a bunch of other apps. Feel like I should raise a hand here and offer some help.. since I'm making full use of the efforts you've put into PureMVC  )

I don't have buckets of time - but I can carve some out if needed, and sounds like it might be needed.

Email me or post to the forum here if you're interested in any help.

Cheers,

Sean

[puremvc]

Sean,

Sounds like you're the one we're looking for. What we need is a single look and feel across the following:

 * Joomla 1.0.15
 * SMF 1.1.1
 * Trac 0.10.3
 * Wordpress 2.3.2

Ideally, I'd like to start with the layout that the main site uses or similar. Definitely that color scheme. That would be common across all the sites. Would it be impossible to adapt the flowing layout stuff (toggle the blue icon in the upper right of the main site) into the SMS or Trac sites?

Looking at http://www.djangoproject.com/ I see they've got Trac 'almost' under control. It is slightly different from the other pages on their site, but the navbar is still mostly consistent.

We could start from scratch if you think that it'd be easier than digging through all the stuff in the various templates on these sites and getting them to work together.

Email me your suggestions/thoughts for how to get started, or post them here.

Thanks,
-=Cliff>

[zydecode]

yeah.. I can see why they've gone that route with Trac - it doesn't have (or really need) a sidebar component, so they've not added one. For a site like yours I think this is a good way to go.. particularly a site that houses code snippets, diagrams etc. If all a sidebar is doing is containing a handful of links, at the expense of being able to scan full-width lines of code, I'd recommend keeping as much of your nav as possible up top (ie: sub-nav bnar under main nav, or drop menus etc).

Joomla - I've been working with 1.5 now for 2 months, after maintaining a couple of 1.0 sites - 1.5 is worth the upgrade in terms of the admin being *way* easier to understand (categories and sections easier to maintain). Themeing is pretty much the same though.

>> "We could start from scratch" - that'd be ideal, all else being equal.. but it's not, you've got a bunch of great content already seeded, and we're all short on time so.. wrapping what you've already got into a cleaner package makes sense until you hit the Big Time (or it all get so frustrating that you have no choice - always a good motivator

Let me take a deeper look at the overall site and I'll email you off forum, probably - but hopefully there will be additional input on this thread.

As the original poster suggested - it's the "ease of use" that really needs a boost here. Shouldn't be too difficult to bust the site out of the frame.... that in itself will really help.