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Heads Up: Novell Communities Getting a Facelift

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30 July 2008 - 12:55am
Submitted by: ssalgy

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As you can see, the refreshed Novell Communities site is here and we are fine-tuning it right now. Thank you for your patience!

  • Content has been designed to be the most prominent thing on the pages with
    navigation and other resources secondary.
  • On index pages, we bring forward relevant information about articles to
    stimulate participation. For example, we show the number of times the
    article was read and number of comments on the initial page, helping you know right away what the community is reading and buzzing about.
  • We now expose the underlying taxonomy to allow you to further
    filter/refine your experience and encourage you to explore topics you find interesting.
  • We added a tag cloud to give a visual depiction of the most popular content.
  • And much more

Begging your Pardon in Advance

Because of the nature of Drupal (the tool we use for this community), it will take a few hours to get everything fine-tuned after we apply the new skins to the site. So... if you see some wonky stuff on the day we launch, please rest assured that we see it too, and are working like madmen to get it all tweaked.

Hope you enjoy the new look! And thank you in advance for your patience when we strip down and suit back up.


Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.



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User Comments

skipt-sd's picture

why drupal, not complaining....

Submitted by skipt-sd on 30 July 2008 - 1:55pm.

would you guys reveal your decision process that had you arrive at drupal?

i'm interested in the arguments as much as the decision.

we are making a similar choice and want to hear the discussion.

jwano's picture

Differences compared to Joomla?

Submitted by jwano on 13 August 2008 - 5:29pm.

Yes, I am also interested to know how drupal compares to Joomla. We are also faced with a similar decision and would like to be in on the arguments leading to drupal as a choice.

ssalgy's picture

Why we like Drupal

Submitted by ssalgy on 18 August 2008 - 5:52pm.

We tried a number of different platforms before settling on Drupal for the Novell Communities, and we really like the decision we made.

We had the need for extreme flexibility -- we needed a tool that would let us slice and dice information across four different communities, some of which would contain non-public information that needed to be protected and served up judiciously. We liked that we could run multiple sites on one installation, and we also really liked being able to control content access via a huge array of roles and permissions. Drupal's tagging abilities, and its extremely flexible "groups" idea made it possible for us to meet the conflicting and converging needs of all of the different visitor segments who use our site.

The other thing we paid attention to is the size and growth of the development community. We needed the ability to add features and functionality as we discovered the need for them, and realized that if we picked an open source CMS project with a large and vibrant developer community, we were more likely to be able to find (or commission) modules for anything that cropped up. That has proven to be the case.

Another big focus for us here is Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Drupal pages are automatically optimized, complete with SEO-friendly URLs.

We consider Joomla a solid out-of-the-box platform that can give you a quick and easy basic web community, with really slick templates. If you're a non-techy, it's probably a good choice for you. Drupal, on the other hand, gives you about 80% of the stuff you need to build a web community on day one. So it's not quite as slick right out of the box, but it is incredibly easy to customize and add the features you need to take you the other 20% of the way. Drupal development is crazy easy, so there are amazing numbers of modules to choose from, and we've made some of our own (and, of course, contributed them back to the project).

I don't know if Drupal is right for your project, but I certainly believe it was right for ours. We love the freedom and flexibility, and now that we've seen what it can do for us, we'd hate to have to use anything else.

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Drupal vs Joomla

Drupal Lovers

anonymous's picture

Thank you for the heads-up

Submitted by anonymous (not verified) on 11 August 2008 - 10:51am.

Hopefully the facelift will make (or allow for) better use of widescreen displays.

Anonymous's picture

Yes, one of the features of

Submitted by Anonymous on 11 August 2008 - 10:55pm.

Yes, one of the features of the new design is a wider display and larger font size.

geoffc's picture

Widescreen support not so clear to me

Submitted by geoffc on 15 August 2008 - 6:41am.

Well, I run a 1920X1200 laptop and the various portions of the screen are not really resizing if my browser is wider or narrower in any meaningful way.

So not such a great new design from that aspect. Size seems to be fixed regardless of browser width. (Firefox 3.0)

I of course would prefer a smaller font size. But i recognize I am probably alone in that regard.

kmillecam's picture

Wid(er) screen support

Submitted by kmillecam on 17 August 2008 - 2:04pm.

Hi Geoff and thanks for the comment.

The Novell designers are pretty sold on fixed-width pages.

The good news is with this iteration of the community design, they did allow for a wider center column and larger, more readable type.

The bad news (for some) is the page is still a fixed width and not truly resizable or "liquid".

The debate rages on WRT what constitutes the optimal line length in web pages. Novell's UI designers are constantly working to come up with designs that a) are functional and b) fit into the corporate template or within the corporate branding guidelines -- sometimes a tall order to fill.

All in all, we're pleased with the design team's efforts to put page readability high on their list of goals.

Anonymous's picture

Print version?

Submitted by Anonymous on 16 August 2008 - 4:08am.

Where is the printer friendly version with full size images? If no printer friendly version how about a pdf of just the article with full size images? The previous version had a print button. It didn't include the full size images but that is better than what the new site has, which is nothing. This is a step back as far as I am concerned. With the wonderful information that is published on the site it is great to be able to print off and have in front of me as I implement the solution or tips presented.

ssalgy's picture

Working on the images thing...

Submitted by ssalgy on 20 August 2008 - 9:10am.

We share your desire for the images to print at full size. This is particularly important for articles in which the screen captures carry critical information that isn't written anywhere else.

The smart guys are looking for a way to do this elegantly, and I have every confidence that sooner or later they'll come up with something slick.

kmillecam's picture

Re: Print version

Submitted by kmillecam on 17 August 2008 - 2:22pm.

Hi Anonymous. Thanks for the feedback.

The printer-friendly version that came with the old template had its own special problems.

A new version (that promises to be far superior) is being worked on and will be part of the community soon.

cgeffcken's picture

Re: Print version

Submitted by cgeffcken on 19 August 2008 - 12:42am.

Sorry, but this is not an acceptable answer for me.
If you release a new version of the site, then this version is complete, including such a basic feature as printing.
Otherwise, it is another case of "wait and see if the customer will react, then we'll do something"
Therefore, I consider this facelift as a failure...

kmillecam's picture

Printer-Friendly has Arrived!

Submitted by kmillecam on 20 August 2008 - 9:05am.

Just thought you would like to know, you can now print community news and articles using the print button conveniently located to the right of each article.... Hope the wait wasn't too painful.

Kevin

Anonymous's picture

Open Search

Submitted by Anonymous on 22 November 2008 - 11:31am.

One thing you could wish to implement is the Open Search module : it would enable users of this site to create their personal feeds based on their actual interests, defined by a search.

For instance, generated a custom GroupWise news feed would just need an URL like http://www.novell.com/communities/opensearch/node/...

As a Drupal dev also doing GroupWise , this is something I'd really like.

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