[theforum] weo signoff

Jeff Howden jeff at jeffhowden.com
Thu Mar 3 15:40:53 CST 2005


Martin,

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> From: Martin Paul Burns
> 
> > yes but -- we seem to have lost some of the front-end
> > functionality of the old site.
> 
> A few tiny bits and pieces. That's one, but it's at the
> "Wouldn't it be good if..."
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I say po-tay-to.  You say po-tah-to.  Honestly, we're missing more than bits
and pieces.

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> None of the core functionality is gone
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No?  Between things that are missing and bugs, I'd say we have a *ton* of
work ahead of us before we're out of the woods.

What about nice, clean, accessible URLs?  What about the highest rated
articles feature?  What about the "Remember Me" part of the login?  What
about validating to the specified DTD?  Why is the article submission part
of the site *still* so *very* confusing?  Do we really need to have the
view/edit permissions checkboxes on the article submission page?  I
personally don't want regular users setting those themselves.  Using color
to denote field-specific errors is not accessible.  Why does every article
page crash IE6?  Why do some pages still show "[date]" where a date should
display instead of an actual date?  Why do we have to show a pic for the
author if one doesn't exist?  Why not just *not* show a pic?  Where's the
RSS feed?  Yeah, I can read source code to find it in <link>'ed in the
<head>, but why isn't linked in the page visually too?  Why is our RSS feed
language setting set to en-GB?  Where does the "Add your rating" link go and
why?  Why can't commenting be turned off by Content for certain articles?
What happened to being able to "Grrr!" a comment?  What is the "Helpful
Comments" box for?  Why are many articles with code samples royally messed
up in the print version?  For that matter, why are *so* many articles
royally messed up in the print version, period?!  Why does the rating refer
to stars when we use cubes?  Why aren't article comments available in the
print version?  Why is the "Member Info" link in articles messed up?  Do
file attachment validation errors have to look so, uh, nasty?  Can we not
only display how long a user has been a member, but also the date they
joined (I personally hate doing date-related math)?  At what point does it
make sense to indicate the number of years a user has been a member, instead
of the number of weeks?  Is 44 a good cut-off?  Is there a reason that only
10 of my articles show up on my profile page?  And, does it *have* to say
"User Posts"?  Why is the "Track" data on the user profile so confusing?
Does it even work?  Why can't members of Content edit users?  Can users be
made inactive?  If not, why not?  What is the dropdown menu on each comment
with a lone "Moderate Comments" option do?  Why does clicking the "Moderate
Comments" button at the bottom of article comments log me out?  Why do the
spam links bring up a "Page Not Found"?  Are comments editable?  Can they be
deleted?  Why can't Content members view ratings on an article?  Why is UK
English and Icelandic the only available language options for the site?
What does the "Syndicate" checkbox on my user edit form do?  Oh, I get it,
that's *highly* intuitive.  Can we *please* address the inline heading tag
on article pages (revisions, edit, preview, etc.)?  Why don't I see promoted
articles on the homepage when I'm logged in?  Where does the "Email to a
friend" link go and why?  Why do we have a site search form that users POST?
That's highly un-user-friendly.  Why does a rather specific search like
"javascript" yield absolutely zero results?  Why can't I tell what "status"
an article has short of going to the edit form?  Why can I see "unpublished"
articles listed for a user when I'm not logged in?  (Sure, clicking the link
I get an "Access denied" page, but still).  Why isn't the list of articles a
user has submitted all available from the user profile page (even if
paginated) and why aren't they grouped by status?  What is the rhyme or
reason to the 10 articles, oops I mean "User Posts", that are listed on a
user profile?  It seems to be last modified date.  If so, that's wrong.  Are
we planning on fixing articles that have #article_path# in them?  Why are
perfectly valid code blocks in articles messed up?	Why doesn't the
login take me back to the page I logged in from?  Can we please something
more "helpful" than "Terminated request because of suspicious input data."
when there are problems with form data submitted for an article (adding or
editing)?  How exactly does a Content member turn on certain tags for
certain articles?  Can we get some consistency in the date/time displays?
(June 2, 2002 in some spots, but Jun 2, 2002 in others)  Would it be too
much to ask to display times with am/pm rather than on a 24 hour clock?  The
date/time an article is published and the categor(y|ies) it's published in
should be below the article title, not above.  Why do we have to manually
map URLs to make old ones work?  Why aren't we developing a system that
recognizes them automatically like we did last time we changed the URL
scheme?  Why do I have to delete "username" and "********" from the login
form everytime I login?  Why doesn't logging out take me back to the page I
logged out from?  Why are certain "special" or inactive categories showing
up on the article add/edit form?  Why can a Content member approve their own
article?  Where is the "unanswered contacts" nightly email?  Where's the
"pending articles" nightly email?  In fact, where are *any article related
emails (new, author changed, admin changed, approved, denied, etc.)?  Why
are we no longer sending out emails to authors when they submit an article
or when we've approved an article?  Is the workflow really nothing more than
two checkboxes labeled "Published" and "In Moderation queue"?  If it's
neither published, nor in moderation queue, what does that mean?  Wouldn't
pending, approved, denied radio buttons be a whole lot easier?  Why do I
have a sudden urge to stick a fork in my eye?  Why do I keep getting "This
discussion is closed: you can't post new comments." whenever I try to
comment on an article I submitted, but when I go to edit the article I don't
see any mechanism for "opening discussion" on the article?  Are we no longer
requiring Content members to identify why they're making changes to an
article?  Wouldn't that be a useful component to version control rendering
it actually worthwhile?  

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> Version control is a *real* biggy
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The list above is far too high of a price to pay for version control and a
table-less layout (that doesn't even work or validate).

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> See last week's discussion - the primary objective was
> to move. We're now very, very late with that. The new
> site is missing a few minor bits, and isn't 'lush' as
> perhaps we'd like it to use neuro_'s phrase.
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Isn't as lush?  Stop minimizing.  It's currently a failure.  I don't think
that even you, with all your experience spinning what people say, could look
at the list above and tell me it's good enough for launch and "isn't 'lush'
as perhaps we'd like it...".  I don't know about you, but I prefer my
projects to actually work and be as bug free as possible.

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> OTOH, it *is* tableless, and we're only, what, 4 years
> behind the curve on that.
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I'll take something that actually works over table-less and bug-ridden.

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> And, y'know, perhaps being more solid backend [...]
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I've yet to see any evidence that substantiates that claim.  It may have
more features, but from what I can tell, it's nowhere near as solid, stable,
or efficient.

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> Please see Jeff's filed bug report on that:
> http://islands.easyweb.co.uk:8080/evolt_bugs/bugs/4
> 
> The only thing keeping it this slow is lack of caching,
> which we won't enable until shortly before launch. We did
> a test, and it's very fast once cached.
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Very fast as compared to what?  Please provide some metrics to give some
depth to those words.

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> This is default Drupal - and a few minutes spent with
> SEs shows that they don't have a problem with Drupal
> sites whatsoever.
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Not true in the least.  A few minutes with any basic SEO info and you'll
know that sites that slap session IDs onto URLs for non-logged-in,
non-cookie users is a *huge* problem for spiders.

All in all, I'm more convinced of a -1,000 to launching with the current TEO
as our new site.

Jeff



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