LinuxVillage.org - front page

[Taco.22]

It's probably about time we made some decisions about the look of the front page of LinuxVillage.org.

Originally it had a welcome page of a fairly static nature, but now that the VillageBox page/article has been posted it has become a revolving page with the last article featured.  Personally I would like to see a Welcome page that introduces the Village and the various spins on offer.  I feel the front page needs to make a statement about LinuxVillage, and then introduce the other elements - forum, spins, picture gallery - whatever seems to fit.  It needs to be active and kept up to date, but should also offer a familiar face.

One of the other things we need to do is link the forum back to the main page - that can be coded easily enough but we actually need to work out a way via the .php templates used.  Melodie is looking at it but if anyone is familiar with said beasty let us know.

How does the rest of the forum feel about all of this?  All discussion and suggestions are invited.

 

[melodie]

To do this we need another template for the Wordpress website. Do you feel like seeking for one which would ease the display of several areas in the same page ? (Let's not go into coding : I don't code, and it's a time greedy thing). If several templates can be pointed to it would be even better, for test purposes (different themes don't provide the same back-end options).

About the header of the present forum I will ask at the smf forums how to do that, when I can find time for it. I still have a post running with a question and a request for a MOD there, I don't want to ask more than one thing at a time.

[Taco.22]

The template shouldn't be a problem - there's only 1690 themes to choose from!!  The one I had chosen for a couple of sites I built was Coraline, including Scorpio - nice and simple but with a good layout for a menu of pages.  But we may want something wider - I'll have another look at the layout potential.

[melodie]

Hi,
I had a look this afternoon and selected one which seems to meet what you are asking for. No promise, it has to be installed, tried, tested...

This is the one:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/responsive

to narrow the search I do this way:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/tag-filter/

and there I ticked the fields "custom-menu" and "custom-header", the first because I want this always, the second because I think we need it for our customized header (but we will have to see how tests will be going).

Please don't point to Evolve : I looks interesting, this is why I tried it before, (maybe one year ago ?) I had found it very complicated with all sorts of graphical options in the backend... a bit too much for my like.

You can use the tag filter gui with different sets of filters the same way, look at many thumbnails, visit the homepage of the themes...

[patrick013]

How does the rest of the forum feel about all of this?  All discussion and suggestions are invited.

Looks fine on my netbook, 1024x600

I use BPG fonts which are a little bolder, kinda medium weight, not lite
and not full bold, just a little darker than regular.   I usually force them
into the display, these standard fonts are so sketchy, you know.

Only comment I care to make.

patrick

[melodie]

Only comment I care to make.

Hi,

I am glad to know it fits in nice in a netbook screen, however the question asked is a bit different:

would it be better to see new articles first, in blog mode, or better that our website looks like a classic CMS and have a static welcome page as it was a little time before ?

The template I pointed to in the former post might allow to get a mix of both... (however I am not installing it today, for after install it will need post configuration, probably a few tests and I will not have time before the next week-end, it seems).

Everyone is welcome to continue the thread, suggest other themes to be tried...