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thread: 5 messages | last: about 2 years ago | started: monday, october 26, 2009, 8:38 am pdt

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#1 | Don Turner (Nottingham, UK)

Monday, October 26, 2009, 8:38 AM PDT

Hi Mike,

Absolute pleasure to have you back! Now I'll get straight into criticizing the new forum ;-)

I really don't like this menu on the left hand side. You can't see when topics were started, who started them or the full description. When you initially click into the forum you're asked to 'click on the left to view a topic' - surely it'd be better to have a full list of topics on the full page rather than asking the user to click first. When I'm reading a topic I don't need to be able to navigate to other topics using the menu so it's pretty pointless the menu being there.

I think that a good forum is really important to building a successful community. It needs to be easy to use and intuitive - as it stands it's difficult to find the information you're looking for.

How about using something like phpBB - it works perfectly on thousands of other sites and has all the features required by a decent forum. I know you'll probably want to do it 'the qcodo way' but why re-invent the wheel when there's something out there that already works great?

Anyway, just my 2 pence worth.

#2 | Mike Ho (Sunnyvale, CA)

Monday, October 26, 2009, 10:53 AM PDT

Don,

Thanks for your suggestions. Yeah, I think the usability could be improved a little bit -- could you post this as a new ticket in the Issues tracker?

In terms of using PHPBB - the reason why we can't use PHP BB actually is because PHP BB isn't nearly feature-rich enough for what we're trying to do with forums on Qcodo.com - the forums/messaging layer on qcodo.com is actually pretty sophisticated - it goes beyond forums, and touches every layer of the qcodo.com website (wiki items, QPM packages, issues, etc.) - and there's a standard, streamlined notification and reporting structure behind it which isn't immediately visible to the end user.

I think you are right though -- there are some UI-level tweaks that can definitely be researched and implemented to make the experience a bit more user friendly and easier/more obvious to use. But the underlying architecture will likely stay as is due to the much deeper/richer functionality that it provides the website.

Thanks!

#3 | Don Turner (Nottingham, UK)

Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 8:35 AM PDT

Hi Mike, thanks for your reply. I've posted an issue in the tracker. I'd be happy to help fix some of these issues, but not too sure on the procedures for doing so.

#4 | Mike Ho (Sunnyvale, CA)

Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 11:19 AM PDT

Yeah... right now, code contributions for Qcodo.com are a bit tougher to handle.

I'll try and do a wiki write up for it when I get a spare moment... but in the meantime, if you're a bit more daring =) you can feel free to get the code from GitHub, or better yet, set up an account on github for yourself and then post a public branch.

The code, itself, is just on qcodo 0.4.3 so if you're familiar enough with qcodo, it should be pretty straightforward to set up. just be sure to update configuration.inc.php to whatever your dev settings happen to be.

In the database directory, there is a make.sh shell script which will make your qcodo.com database for you -- just be sure to update make.sh to, again, whatever your local dev environment settings happen to be.

And finally, if everything is running properly, you should be able to run cli/qcodo data-loader to have Qcodo randomly generate a bunch of data for you into your local dev qcodo.com database so that you can actually run a website in your local dev environment with real-ish looking data. =)

#5 | Don Turner (Nottingham, UK)

Thursday, October 29, 2009, 9:24 AM PDT

Cool, thanks Mike, i'll have a look into it.

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