Hi Everyone,
In order to implement a new feature request we had to upgrade MSP to a new theme. It’s not all that different from the old one; we know how everyone on here hates change! 😉
Anyway, the new feature request is related to the comments. You should now see below the “comments” box the option to “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.” Several people had asked for this feature, so it is now implemented. Basically this will allow you to follow a specific thread more closely as you’ll be emailed as soon as someone responds on that thread. Please let us know if there are any problems with the feature (e.g., it doesn’t work or you can’t unsubscribe).
In order to add this feature we had to upgrade from the very old theme we were using to a newer theme that interfaces better with the latest version of WordPress. We kept the three column layout with all the features in the same place. The differences are mostly behind the scenes but there are also minor cosmetic differences. Even so, if you see something that is amiss or something is no longer working, please drop me an email: profxm -at- gmail.com.
In addition to the upgrade mentioned in the OP, it looks like “Recent Comments” now consistently display in the second column. A welcome improvement, thanks!
Also, it looks like front-page posts are automatically summarized, so any embedded media is only available after clicking through. Not a worry, just mentioning it in case anyone happened to wonder where all the videos went.
sweeeeet!
everything looks so clean!
One suggestion: with the new theme/layout, I’d suggest increasing the number of posts that display on the front page in the first column — whatever number is required to balance out the first column with the very long third column.
And is it agreed that we need a new graphic for up top?
I agree with increasing the number of posts on the first page, if that is possible to edit.
I dunno about the graphic. My only issue previously was that it had covered up the site title. But now it doesn’t do that.
This new layout is much more pleasant to my eyes. But, for me, visual simplicity is always preferred. Although it would be nice to have that banner picture full size again. I really like that picture. 🙂
I agree that the new layout is much cleaner and neater, though I also concur that I preferred the bigger banner picture. Also, agree about having more posts on the front page to balance out the longer columns on the right.
And I have a request, don’t know how difficult it would be to accommodate or if anyone cares but me, but would it be possible to list the blogroll in order of most recently updated instead of alphabetically? (I confess having personal vested interest for this, since my blog is alphabetically way down on the list. 🙂
Leah, that’s a good point on the blog roll. It’s much more useful and effective when it’s listed by most recent update.
The number of posts on the front page has been increased to 30 from 10. I’m looking into the blog roll order. As for the graphic at the top… If I make it bigger, it starts to bleed into the other stuff at the top. I could duplicate it along the top. I think it would probably sit fine behind the search box. Would that work?
Re banner graphics, since the new banner height looks to be only 100 pixels tall, it might work better to use a black background for the entire width of the top section that includes the Main Street Plaza title, banner graphic, and search field. Almost any graphic will look more stunning if it’s not bookended by dazzling white.
The main problem with the small graphic is that the text on the sign in the graphic is unreadable. That sign is what makes that graphic so awesome.
I think I can crop the graphic so that the sign’s text becomes legible again. I kind of like the shorter banner since it doesn’t eat up so much real estate on my iphone screen.
Sitting behind the search bar would work with me, but I also see TGD’s point that this is one graphic that needs to be read.
Okay, I cropped the height of the banner, but left it at the same resolution so the text is readable. I also placed it behind the search box and moved the search box so BY’s imposing face is visible (like he’s commanding you to SEARCH!). Thoughts?
I like it! Definitely an improvement. But looks like it needs to be resized so the bottom of the graphic does not extend beyond the bottom of the search box.
That looks good! I still kind of lean towards the idea of making the background of the masthead black instead of white, though, if it’s not too difficult.
Regarding the graphic itself, I like doing theme banners periodically, but I like this one as our main, default banner. The three little pictures tell the story of “Main Street Plaza” quite nicely. 😀
I’m still working on ordering the blogroll by update status. I found a plugin that seems to do this, but it’s not all that user-friendly. In the meantime, you can hover over blogroll links and you should see the four most recent posts. If anyone knows of other blogroll plugins for wordpress that order the blogroll by how recently it was updated, please let me know.
That said, it’s a little unfortunate to crop off the part of the photo where it says:
Without that, the point isn’t as clear. Is it possible to increase the banner height of this theme?
cool, I like it that way. But I’ll admit I’m not a graphic designer, so we should wait for some more opinions. 😀
Looks good to me!
Updated. Thoughts on the graphic? I think it’s nice now.
I’m thinking the blogroll organized by update status is working, but there are a bunch that are simply defunct. Should we remove the defunct ones?
Re the graphic: Somebody just did exactly what I was intending to do in Photoshop. Y’all have got skillz and I agree: it’s nice now. Nice work.
The graphic looks good.
The author bylines for individual articles seems to have disappeared. Is that intentional? I like knowing who wrote what.
That said, we’ve now got a vast expanse of undelightsome whiteness in the vertical space between “A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism” and “Home” | “Welcome to Main Street Plaza” …
Does this theme allow you to drop a graphic below “A Community for Anyone Interested in Mormonism” ?? If so, maybe a white-backgrounded image along the lines of ” … a project of the Mormon Alumni Association” or some other nonsense?
I see dead space.
Holy crap, Leah’s right. I’m done contributing suggestions until you people bring back my frickin’ byline. I think I’m starting to get a pretty good idea about what this whole “redesign” was all about. Notice how the “ExMormon” and “Ockham’s Razor” graphics suddenly look so much bigger? Har har 😉
On a serious note, I second the suggestion to purge defunct blogs from the roll.
Chino — I was thinking the same thing about the defunct blogs. I’ll get to work on it.
Wow, I think it looks really great! Much more streamlined than the old version.
I’m loving the new layout, but then again – simple and clean is always better in my book. Thanks for making it so that i can get follow-up comments by email. Muchos gracias!
but yeah, now the only problem (which is kinda a big deal) is how there is no attribution.
why would anyone make a theme without bylines? what are we, The Economist?
What is the byline that used to be there?
The name of the poster of a post.
In this new theme, currently, there is no way to tell who has written any of the posts here.
yeah, I noticed that earlier. I thought it was a glitch. Surely there is an easy way to fix that?
I hope the byline is fixed. I feel lost on blogs, especially community blogs, when I don’t know the context from which the point of view is sourced. I need a byline.
Good news is that Google Reader still shows the bylines even if the don’t appear on the blog itself. The bad news is that Google Reader still shows the bylines when they do need to be suppressed. 🙁 Oh well.
I agree, we need the bylines back. Also, the blogroll still doesn’t seem to be in order of most recently updated.
I imagine that would be a tough one to implement. I’ve actually only seen that “updating blogroll” thing on blogspot blogs…
unless it’s something incredibly simple that I’m just not thinking of, like an RSS feed or something.
*sigh* Okay, I guess MSP doesn’t have to revolve around me. I just get a kick out of seeing my blog go to the top of the atheist blogroll when I post something new. 🙂
No, seriously, as a fellow prolific poster, I would benefit from this too, haha.
I just am trying to see it from profxm’s PoV as administrator
Okay, the blogroll status update is working, but it’s now taking MSP 10 seconds or more to load. More information = slower load times.
I have a solution that will speed things up a bit – clean out the blogroll. Any blog that hasn’t been updated in over 1 year is going to get moved to the “defunct” category and won’t show up on MSPs blogroll. How does that sound?
Sounds fair to me! Thanks for humoring me. 🙂
profxm — Yes, I’m working on it this morning. I just finished reading all of the last of this week’s new posts, and now I’ll go through the blogroll and delete the inactive ones.
It’s not problem to just delete them completely from MSP because I still have them on the “Outer Blogness” list and in my RSS reader (so I’ll know if they come back from the dead). We can keep the MSP list exclusively for active blogs.
chanson, I just moved the defunct (over 1 year with no post) blogs to new categories. The post-mormon ones are in a category called “defunct – post” and the TBM ones are in a category called “defunct – tbm”. If they come back from the dead, we can simply move them back into their respective categories. The blogroll lists that show up on MSP are specific to link categories, so the defunct ones are excluded (should be as of now).
OK, cool.
This looks really nice!
Yay! for Main Street Plaza!
I’m not seeing a numbering of the comments, which makes it harder to address people in a long conversation, I think.
Okay, post author is back, and so are comment numbers. Any more requests?
Great work, profxm!
@47: Yeah, add a donation button so it’s easier to buy you a beer for your hard work.
The Notify me of followup comments via e-mail is one of my favorites. It makes me more likely to comment…you may regret this. 🙂
Chris — The more the merrier! 😀
By the way, it looks like the “Sir Thomas More (or Less)” blog needs to be removed from the Post-Mormon Blogroll. For some reason, it’s always bumped up to the top, but when you click through, there’s nada. FYI 🙂
Same thing is the case with Dissenting in Part for the TBM blogs.
Jon Adams over at USU SHAFT photoshopped this and I’ve cropped it to size and am leaving it here as a potential alternative masthead (click through for the 650x218px version):
That’s cool!
I wonder if we could do like nine moons and have the masthead vary at random when people load the page…?
What I’d really like is a button that allows me to choose a masthead according to my mood. 😉 But something like what Nine Moons has got going on would be cool, too. 🙂 Oh, and I’ve decided what I’d like to see in that white space below the big “Main Street Plaza”: an mp3 player so I can listen to tunes while browsing here. Har har.
Random mastheads would be cool, but that would require something like flash or someone who actually knows php (and not someone like me, who just tinkers until he gets it right). I may be able to include an mp3 player, but I’m not personally a fan of music players on sites unless they are OFF by default. Also, who gets to choose the music selection?
Oh, one other thought… There are some plugins for WordPress that convert the site into a different format for people surfing on mobile phones (much easier to browse). Should I add that functionality as well?
It’s Friday night on my side of the planet, so pls make allowances for any inane suggestions.
Re mastheads, at the end of the day, I’d be just as pleased if someone could simply manually switch ’em up every now and then. First step is probably collecting a batch of properly-sized images. While we’re on the subject, here’s another:
I’m also not a big fan of gaudy MP3 players, but since everyone seems to be clamoring for one, here’s my suggestion: just embed the playlist from Radio Deliro.
If setting up the mobile version is easy, that’d be awesome. I’m able to navigate the site on my iPhone pretty easily now, but a mobile version would sure make it easier on the ol’ eyes.
Further to my previous comment, here’s a first batch (I’ll contact Matsby and discuss permissions in due course):
lol, those are great!
I have a photo I took on Main Street Plaza last January of a chain blocking an entrance with a sign saying “For Your Safety PLEASE KEEP OUT.” It’s pretty funny, I think, and I’d post it here if I could figure out how…. Chino Blanco, I just took your email address from your commenter info on my blog and sent it to you. You’re welcome to add it to the mix if you want. Let me know if it doesn’t come through.
p.s. All the images above are funny, but I especially love Frodo with the CTR ring. Brilliant.
I don’t know, Holly, you seem to be taking us to a bleak place with this one 😉
what can I say. It was a real scene–repeated several times over–on the physical Main Street Plaza during the winter.
No disrespect intended. I freely admit that it wasn’t a surplus of mental fortitude that led me to run away to a subtropical island. It was a good move and the schadenfreude makes watching Fargo all that much more fun.
Don’t mess with Matsby.
It looks OK from my mobile, but it’s a smartphone.
Okay, the banner now changes over time (every 20 seconds or so). Not the best banner rotation plugin, but it will work. I also added a plugin that makes the site mobile phone friendly. I can add a radio/music widget, but the site is already slow as hell loading (mostly from the blog post updates). Thoughts?
I say the music/radio widget isn’t necessary.
music on sites is the bane of the internet anyway.
I second Andrew S. and retract my earlier (lamebrained) suggestion.
This is minor, but is there any way that Page 2 of comments can begin with #51 as opposed to #1?
Took some doing, but it should be continuous numbering now.
Thing is, there’s now the possibility to reply to specific comments as opposed to just the post (e.g., yours is 71.1 and not 72). This might be fine. Guess we’ll see.
I can turn that off if you’d like. I like the idea of threaded comments so people know to whom they are replying.
I hate threaded comments. It can make it really hard to find the latest comments.
Nesting is off.
I’d like to submit a suggestion for a new feature: How about a section that allows us to post links? For example, I just noticed this new podcast: Economics Professor Michael McBride on Religious Free-Riding and the Mormon Church and I don’t really want to post about it, but it sounds interesting enough that I’d love to see a link in a sidebar somewhere here at MSP.
Yeah, there are generally two ways to do some kind of sideblog/notes from all over.
The one I use at Irresistible (Dis)Grace is to have a widget feed for an RSS feed…and the RSS feed I use is my del.icio.us account, so whenever I add something to del.icio.us, it goes on my sidebar.
This is also what BCC uses, for example.
However, what many of the blogs use (Mormon Matters, Mormon Mentality, Feminist Mormon Housewives) is a Notes from All Over Plugin that DKL at Mormon Mentality developed based off a really old plugin, “WP Recent Links.”
I have the file for that Notes from All Over plugin, but it needs a little configuration out of the box (since DKL did not originally make it widget-friendly, it is hard-coded into MMentality’s site, for example.)
Hey, thanks for the tip. That del.icio.us for WordPress plugin sounds like just the thing.
That is a great idea!
If this feature ends up being implemented, pls note this del.icio.us account can be shared among those who’d like to contribute to the linkroll: http://www.delicious.com/mainstreetplaza
Okay, I’ll see what I can do.
FYI, while I’m at it, I’m probably going to do some reshuffling of the sidebars. First, I think I’m going to split the blogroll again. This time it’s going to be into: active blogs and inactive blogs (taking a cue from LDS Inc.). I hate how long MSP takes to load. So, I’m going to move blogs that haven’t been updated for more than 30 days into an “inactive” category and turn off the “update” function on them. Hopefully that will reduce the load time on MSP pages. They’ll still be displayed, but they’ll be ordered alphabetically, not by how recently they were updated. And I think I’m going to take the “update” feature off the TBM blogs entirely. Who comes here to find out what is going on in the TBM blogosphere anyway? Removing those updates should reduce load times dramatically.
Also, there are hundreds of broken links. I’m going to fix them.
Finally, our tag list has kind of gotten out of control. Anyone interested in cleaning it up a bit?
Something to think about: can you find statistics on how often people use the links to the tags?
If not used often, they don’t have to be listed at all. Posts can still be tagged with tags, but the tags just won’t be shown in a sidebar widget.
(For me, a vibrant search features and archives are generally more helpful for finding posts)
The changes you propose are all sensible. Go for broke!
Delicious plugin is working. I would have added a link, but I don’t have the username/password.
I moved the side panel widgets around a bit.
I also changed the upper limit for a blog being inactive – if an outer blogness blog hasn’t been updated for 60 days, it’s getting moved to the “Outer Blogness – Not Hot” list that doesn’t include when it was last updated. If you want to be on the “Outer Blogness – Hot!” list, you need to be actively posting.
I also converted the tags/categories and archives into drop-down menus. I’m guessing no one uses those anyway, but now they are out of the way.
Any other requests?
Wow, nice work. I’ll send the del.icio.us login details by email.
A few nitpicking suggested changes for side panel widget titles:
Stuffing ‘Categories’ and ‘Archives’ into drop-down menus was a great idea.
ETA: And the dynamic blogroll seems to be loading much faster now that it’s been pared down.
Nice. I suggest “Active” and “Less active” instead of “Hot” and “Not hot” though.
I am so not hot.
This place looks effing fab, well done all of you. 🙂
kuri (#86): While those terms are, maybe, a little less offensive in a regular context, given that we’re primarily a former-Mormon community, I just can’t bring myself to use them. I’ve spent too much of my life thinking about “active” and “less-active” Mormons. I’m open for alternative descriptors, but I gag when I hear the phrase “less-active”!
Other suggestions to distinguish between the regularly updated blogs and the others?
profxm,
I can understand that the gag-reaction is perhaps too strong to suppress, but that is the point — we re-appropriate the patronizing terms used in Mormon contexts to poke fun at those terms.
I don’t have much else. I was thinking keep “hot” but change “not hot” to “lukewarm”…but old blogs don’t need to be spat out.
Lukewarm… Now that I like. I’ll go with “hot” and “lukewarm” if people don’t object to it. 😉
What Andrew said, but no biggie. I appreciate all the work you’re doing to make the blogroll better.
“Lukewarm” causes a delightful burning in my bosom, too. No matter what ProfXM decides, I’ll be raising my arm to the square and sustaining him anyways.
Yes, I agree too — great improvement!
I’m still finding and adding blogs to the list constantly, so if ProfXM is willing to sort the blogs by temperature, that’s great!
p.s. I think the faithful blogs naturally should be labeled “the Bloggernacle”.
RE #94: Doh! Of course it should! Fixed.
Note to self: This site ( http://www.imagesoftherestoration.org/blog/ ) is chock full of potential exmo masthead and other art.
Here’s a fresh masthead banner that can be added any time:
h/t cromulent742
And another potential masthead banner, courtesy of canadianjohnson
I like the new view count that automatically displays with each post, but I’ve noticed there’s a missing space between the number display and the first letter of the post. For now, I’m simply adding the HTML code for a blank space as a workaround.
And yet another potential masthead banner, courtesy of canadianjohnson
And here’s another new banner addition:
Is it possible for the view count to be posted with the date, author name, and category (in that smaller, gray font)?
Hi Andrew,
I’ve been trying to figure it out, but haven’t had much luck. The post count is, of course, unnecessary. I thought it might be interesting to see, but if it’s irksome, I can get rid of it. One option that is available is to put it at the bottom of posts instead of at the top. Would that be better?
If it would be easiest to put it at the bottom, that would work. I imagine that if what I’m asking requires a look at post.php, since that’s what we had to do at Wheat & Tares
Also, is it possible to get a mobile plugin.? I have prblems commenting on my phoje (so I can’t proofreas anything I’m saying rigt nowl because the browser kweps pulling me to the top of the comments. WPtouch or something like that should work.
Views moved to bottom of posts. I had a mobile theme installed, but it wasn’t as good. I swapped it out for WPtouch. Try it now and let me know if there are any problems.
Very helpful!
I know at W&T, we actually have 2 mobile plugins…one for iOS, webOS, and Android devices (that’s wptouch), and another for nontouch smartphones (e.g., blackberries). If there are people who use BBs, that may be an option.
Here’s another banner (this one was designed to match the smaller version that I’m asking http://www.i-am-an-exmormon.com to put up for us):
Not sure what just happened. I was updating the YouTube clip in the sidebar, and when I came back to check the front page, all the graphics/video/radio/etc. were gone. I’m completely stumped, but I’ll repair asap.
Thanks for all your hard work, Chino!
Hey, just for the record: Don’t try to use special characters in the text in the side column boxes. This is the second time I’ve blown up all the custom widgets and it happened because I tried to save this text: Use the glove, feel the Spirit
I’ll rebuild the graphic links and other stuff asap.
Ughhh. I just blew up the sidebars. Again. Must’ve been some unacceptable characters in the video clip embed code I was pasting into MSP TV. Oh well. If anyone has any requests for changing up sidebar features, speak now or forever hold your peace. Otherwise, I’ll redo to resemble what was there before.