It has been four years! (well, three and a half) since I updated this thread. Three and a half years of crickets. And The Cricket. And The Ashes. Which I don't think we won. Anyway.
You see all that, up there? Yeah. So did we. We scrapped it. We've moved to a Swift based system (yes, that swift) which uses the Vapor framework as its backend. What does this mean? Mostly, speed. Swift is a compiled language which means it runs as an 'app', rather than compiling JIT like some other programming languages. (cough, php).
Our aim was, obviously, not to depart too radically from what our members are used to. For this example, we will display four of our new pages against three of our old pages. The astute among you will see those numbers don't line up. Hang on, you'll see why in a moment.
Note: Top is the current website, bottom is the new website.
As you can see, we don't want to depart too radically from our members muscle-memory. We still have a hero-unit with a featured image. But we now have a nav that isn't at the top of the page (but sticks, after you scroll 😃) and we have two 'news highlights'. My aim is to change these day-to-day - and to have about ten most-recent articles below the headlines. As I am currently re-hacking the website using flex-box, this is what I've got at the moment. Suffer. Haha.
As more content is posted to the forums, it is important to try to get that content out. On our new Forums Index, we display the three most recently posted-to articles to the side of the forum name (and description) as a bit of a peek into the forum. It is not designed as an authoritative "This was the last post", but rather as a "Hm, this looks interesting".
The wiki is still very much a work in progress but now comes (as does your account, and our admin and mod panels) with tabs! What do the tabs do? They act as a secondary navigation source. On the wiki - if you're allowed to edit the article - you'll have both an edit and 'revision history' tab. In your account, you'll have tabs to edit your password, user settings, and to report a bug.
Ah, the fourth page. Wikis are diverse sources of information. What if you just want to browse what's there? Behold, the auto-generate, wiki-all page. Whenever a new article is added, this page updates itself. Handy, eh?
That's it for now. It's midnight. I'm going to bed before I sleep here.
