Hello again, i'm sorry i couldn't keep you updated about the inkscape gallery developement but the days i spent here on the list were really useful and i had a work a lot to do what these speeches suggested me to do. I would like to keep track of what happened in the days when we talked about inkscape gallery in various threads in this list that maybe caused troubles to the user who didn't want to read thousands of mail. So: when i came here for the first time inkscape gallery was a project for an inkscape made drawings gallery on the web in an advanced state but still not completely grown. There were a narrowed layout, a bunch of features but it needed content organization and a couple of improvements in both layout stuffs and features. Many of you gave impressions, suggestions even critiques and this was exactly what i needed to come back working to make inkscape gallery better.
So what i did in these days?
1)When i left the list i announced the svg upload and the user picture features were added.
But then i realized that we needed to work on the content organization, to decrease the scrolling need, to make lighter pages to not overload the cms and the webserver and to decrease the amount of javascripts that were going to slowdown all the site navigation.
If you go now to see inkscape gallery you will see:
2)a splash page, bilingual with two main access links, giving you two ways to start using inkscape gallery;
3)"quickstart" and "enter the website".
4)You find a sort of "user guide" with many useful information (i hope...) in pdf linked in a RTFM! button.
5)You don't see the button menu in the splash page but you may show it just by clicking on the + icon in the main menu area. This feature is being used in most of the site sections, to avoid long page scrolling where we thought that the buttons menu was not necessary.
6)We have new blocks called "pop" in some sections. They are showing the most viewed images in the last days.
7)We have a list of avatars (not yet, really...but the tool is there), and we'd like to launch the website with an avatar contest too. You may add your pictures (inkscape made!) to attend to this contest. You may vote on images to make us easy to choose which to include. (we will use all of them in the first stage!).
8)If you see the artists section you have a shortened version of the user profile page. This is meant to hide empty fields and to keep the section meaningful. Please use the "who am i" description field when you create account, cause i think it's nice to have an short user description.
I'm not saying that is perfect now, i have a long list of fixes and improvements still pending, i will put this online in the forum. This is the time when we'll look around for someone who'll help us in maintaining and improving the website. We are good in webdesign and we know drupal quite well, but we aren't php developers, and this is what will give us the chance to significantly improve inkscape gallery in the future. So, hope to see all of you in inkscape gallery 'cause the development is over for now, we're in production and we'll go online on monday 11 February. hope to be ready...
Da. http://test.inkscapegallery.net http://www.inkscapegallery.net