Hello Glen,
Its great that we now have a good solid backend foundation for roller.
As, you said we can now improve the front-end side of roller with the
changes you mentioned below. I am sharing below my ideas about the
points you mentioned.
On Thursday 03 July 2014 07:19 AM, Glen Mazza wrote:
Hi Gaurav, I've been working heavily on the backend and am thankfully
getting to a point where I can look more at the frontend. We may need
to release Roller 5.1 just to get retire the 5.0.x series -- front-end
looks very similar, but back-end is much cleaner and faster to build,
lower maintenance, etc. So Roller 5.1 is at least standing on a good
foundation, even if the UI themes need some work.
Some of the UI things I'd like to see done (some may get into 5.1,
some may in a subsequent patch release), regardless of who does them,
are as follows:
1.) Both the gaurav and fauxcoly themes OOTB say "here's the top 30
tags for this blog", but that doesn't help a starting blogger who has
just one or two blog entries and next to no tags--the blog looks bad
that way. A blog theme should look good from day one even if the
blogger has just a few blog entries. I'd like to see the tag stuff
removed and have it replaced with either the blogroll, ATOM feeds, or
something else. One idea is to move the top horizontal menu line
providing archives, login, buttons to the side and include categories
in the top horizontal line instead.
Correct, it looks odd that for new blogger it will not show the tag
cloud. Rather than removing we can put a condition that if more than 5
tags comes than we can show that complete box/panel of hot tags.
Rather than moving the top horizontal menu we can just add another nav
element Categories (and then show all categories in dropdown when
someone hover over it) eg: http://awesomescreenshot.com/02f333os92
2.) The fauxcoly theme uses YUI (Yahoo User Interface) stored in
webapp/roller-ui/yui, but the YUI is from 2009. I'd like to have it
replaced with the latest release YUI. The YUI we ship with Roller is
not just for fauxcoly, but for any YUI-based custom theme a user may
wish to create (by keeping it in roller-ui/yui a new theme creator
doesn't have to bother importing all the YUI files with his theme.)
Also, if the theme can be tweaked a bit to be responsive while using
YUI still that would be good.
What I think is two option for this, we can replace YUI with bootstrap
themes (http://bootswatch.com/) and this is make it responsive. Also
with this we can upgrade the back-end UI also through which it will be
easier to create blogs from any screens (mobiles and tabs on the go).
Another option is upgrading to YUI 2 to YUI 3, but YUI 3 might not
provide much features which bootstrap provides, although from docs it
seems it has responsiveness support.
My Idea is to go with bootstrap as its easier to upgrade it and active
development is going at hight pace and will enhance the UI very much.
3.) The gaurav theme of course uses Bootstrap and JQuery. Likewise,
rather than directly incorporate that stuff in the gaurav theme, I'd
like to have it placed under webapp/roller-ui/bootstrap and have the
gaurav theme reference those files from there. That way, again,
anyone can come up with their own Bootstrap-based theme without
needing to upload all the Bootstrap files.
+1
4.) Both the gaurav and fauxcoly themes duplicate an icons folder
having all the social media bitmaps for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
etc. I'd like to see those icons stored in one place, maybe
roller-ui/icons or /socialmedia or whatever, so themes can reference
those icons without needing to duplicate them into their themes.
+1. Another Idea is to add a share link with each blog similar to this.
(http://awesomescreenshot.com/021333r131). I think we can use these
share buttons, we can check other apache projects for any licence issue
if it have.
5.) Shelan, another contributor around 2010 created a mobile weblog
view for a blog, as you can see in the upper-right corner here:
http://www.nailedtothex.org/roller/kyle/entry/nested-list-element-issue-of1
. The mobile theme doesn't seem to work right today (that blog entry
at that link shows the problems with it, the blogger had to make
changes basically making it a standard blog anyway, and even with
those changes I saw further errors with it.) What Shelan did was very
nice circa 2010 (before Bootstrap existed) but might be frowned upon
today, I think one is expected to use a responsive theme today when
you want to support all types of devices, rather than have
(antiquated?) "click here for mobile" and "click here for standard"
buttons. Unsure, but we may wish to pull this out of the basic theme
once fauxcoly and gaurav are better established.
+1. Rather than different mobile and standard buttons we can have that
same theme work on mobile, tablets and desktops. I think this might also
clean up a bit code in java and front-end themes as we do not have to
make specific templates for mobiles.
6.) Our website is old-fashioned, perhaps about 50% of Apache websites
are now using Bootstrap and I'd like Roller to be one of them. The
stuff that is on the Roller Wiki would remain there, so that doesn't
need converting, just the several relatively small pages making up
roller.apache.org.
Exicted to take this up :) We can definately use bootstrap on roller
website. Just want to know in which framework the current website is in
and have to check how easy to customize it.
7.) We eventually should have a sample theme (probably non-responsive
as this is a portal-type page) showing how to display Roller's Planet
functionality (it is very crude here:
http://rollerweblogger.org/project/page/planet, the CSS isn't
working). I haven't looked at this at all, and am unsure how well the
backend still supports it.
I am bit unclear about the planet concept. Can you please tell me a bit
what exactly it does.
If any of this sounds interesting to you (or any other Roller
committer), just let us know so we're not duplicating effort and feel
free to jump into it!
Regards,
Glen
Just let me know priority wise which task to take first, then we can
move around all and complete it.
Thanks
Gaurav
On 06/18/2014 03:18 AM, Gaurav Saini wrote:
Hello Glen,
Thanks for this informative reply. I was looking for some suggestions
and you provided. :)
I am interested in any UI work related to roller. I can handle all
the UI work inside roller although there might not be as much but if
you have any issues in JIRA known to you I would love to contribute
towards them.
I have been working on AngularJS, nodejs projects from last some time
and also have vast expirience in CSS mainly how to perfectly use
Bootstrap. I am focusing my future in client side with nodejs coming
in scope we can have backend built with javascript.
So, I love to contribute to any client side work (UI) to roller
anytime. :)
Thanks
Gaurav
On Sunday 15 June 2014 10:11 PM, Glen Mazza wrote:
Hi Gaurav, yes, I hope gaurav the theme (and Gaurav the person) gets
a lot *more* attention too... :)
You are most welcome to submit a proposal for any Apache project,
and you don't need anybody's permission to do so. I've never given a
presentation at ApacheCon so I wouldn't know much more than what the
website would tell you. I'd be cautious though, I'm not certain
they will cover your formidable transportation and lodging costs if
they accepted your presentation (or may take that into account when
judging to accept your proposal, reducing the chances of its
acceptance). 'Course, at this early stage in your career, given the
amount of time and effort it would take to give a presentation in
Europe, it might be better for you to spend that time on gaining
more technical know-how anyway (say, by submitting more Roller
patches :), as substance is always better than show.
Regards,
Glen
On 06/13/2014 08:22 AM, Gaurav Saini wrote:
Hello Dave and Glen,
I am really excited and interested in submitting a paper on Apache
Roller.
I have worked on roller and have contributed to roller some months
back. I also have contributed the responsive theme for roller which
is really gaining some attention.
Glen, might be knowing me and remembering me. I can provide a
hands-on tutorial or an introduction for beginners about Roller.
Can anyone please guide me how I can go for this ? Is there
anything specific anyone has idea for which I can prepare the
paper. This is my first time and really looking forward for this
conference.
Thanks
Gaurav
On Friday 13 June 2014 05:29 PM, Dave wrote:
Dear Roller fans,
As you may be aware, ApacheCon will be held this year in Budapest, on
November 17-23. (See http://apachecon.eu for more info.)
The Call For Papers for that conference is still open, but will be
closing soon. Now is your chance to tell the world about how you
use Roller. This could be any level of talk - a deep technical talk,
a hands-on tutorial, an introduction for beginners, or a case study
about the awesome stuff you're doing with Roller.
Please consider submitting a proposal, at
http://events.linuxfoundation.org//events/apachecon-europe/program/cfp
Thanks!
--
Regards,
Gaurav Saini
Developer and Internet Marketing
