mightychurch.com

Hi everyone, I’ve made some changes to the front page which hopefully gives a better idea of activity on the site.

The prayer function has been moved down a bit, I still want to do something with this & i have some ideas, but I think I’ll wait until the community grows a bit. It’s still there and you can use it, and thanks to everyone who has used it so far!

In the mean time, in the second column I’ve added the latest forum topics by date, & hopefully that gives the front page a bit more of a blog feel, encourages new topics (though things have been going well so far!), and makes it easier to see what new topics have been posted. You can still see current discussions per forum on the left (or right in the forums). 

It’s not perfect, there’s still a lot of little things I’d like to do, and a bunch of things I have to fix ;) but I’m about to go into a crunch period with a client project, and thought rather than waiting for the time to do everything I’d just make some running changes now. Check it out and let me know what you think.

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Also, on the blog feed side of things, I’m pretty happy with it at the moment, but are there any other low(ish) volume, high quality, highly relevant blogs out there you would like to see added to the mix?

I think there’s a good flow there at the moment, and I want to keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, but if there are any other blogs or web publications that could go into the mix then by all means let me know!

Hi Luke. You’ve done a terrific job. Having said that, and really as a minor quibble ... the front page has too much text. It needs a graphic or two to break it up. A lead article (that changes every week or two) with a graphic would be great. Otherwise perhaps members might offer photos of people/places/events/whatever that are appropriate/relevant/interesting to others on the forum. A cartoon would work too (and I know a cartoonist who might be willing to contribute as a way of advertising their skills). Just some ideas. Thanks again for all your efforts.

I LOVE this header theme and the grunge / sticky tape and everything.

Anyway, I don’t know how technically feasible it is or if I’ve just missed this function already on this forum, but it would be great if there was an “auto-link” clickable feature for news items to start a thread. You already have a “Start discussion” button under news items… does that automatically link the thread to that item? Does it change colour or anything to indicate that there’s already a thread going on that theme?

Cheers.

Also, subject tags like bbpress? I’d make room on the home page for a subject tag cloud and the starter of each thread got to choose or add subject tags… but that’s up to you. Seems to be a “thang” at bbpress.

Cheers mate. I wish I had all your coding skills.

Thanks for the feedback guys! :)

@Angus, yeah I was thinking now having three rows of very similar small entries looks pretty samey, & your comments got me thinking about different layout formats for the news & blogs, so I’ll give it some more thought, thanks!

@Dave, I was thinking along the same lines & totally know what you mean, but unfortunately there’s nothing out-of-the-box which does that currently (there’s no link between news/blog post & thread). I’ve got some ideas and a way it might be possible, but it would require a bit of hacking so I’ll have to put it off for a while. No tagging functionality is available either unfortunately, which is a shame because it is a good idea!

BTW — I think you’ve probably got enough Christian blogs up on the home page. Any more, and I’d just feel guilty for not reading them all. ;-)

Hey, Simple Machines Forum just upgraded to 2.0 RC1 and it has WYSIWYG, surely Expression Engine has WYSIWYG buttons for editing posts? I mean, most experienced forum users would know how to enter stuff, but it’s the newbies getting all frustrated I’m thinking of.

On the other hand, I’d hate to see a bunch of ugly buttons cluttering up your beautiful design…. maybe if they were really “light” coloured and off to the left it would not be too ugly? (Anyway, concentrate on your big project for now and then come back to this when you’ve got time.)

Angus Johnson - 05 February 2009 02:48 PM

Hi Luke. You’ve done a terrific job. Having said that, and really as a minor quibble ... the front page has too much text.

It is a great site overall.  I second this minor quibble - the second column is probably unnecessary given that the first column tells you what’s being discussed at the forums anyway.  By taking out that column the others can be made thicker or some white space can be put between them.  Up to you…

No Angus, it’s a LEGENDARY site! I’ve been trying to learn CMS / forum stuff for a while now, and think I can just begin to glimpse how high this MT Everest of web design Luke has conquered here really is.

The only thing I’d add is WYSIWYG post editor buttons and functionality. Other than that, brilliant!

Have you given though to including Dave Miers’ blog (http://www.davemiers.com) in the newsfeed?

Simple and snappy blog entries, the way I like them.

I like the search function.  Used it for the first time and gave me the results I wanted.