Breadcrumb links fixed, RSS feeds should be up today as well; I’m finally home from SXSW and performing the much needed tweaks to take care of these oversights.  Thanks everyone for the reports.

I installed several more forum themes to choose from, so for those who prefer the old look (or something completely different) you now have a choice.

cool colors, now i more enjoy being here. my fav colors, this dark-red scent. it would be nice if the real forum part the white area on the support theme) could also be biased to match that style… also to able to ‘minimize’ the content below, which shows only stats, would be great!

Okay, since you asked for opinions, i will give you mine:  As much as I love CodeIgniter, i much prefer the old logo & the look and feel of your previous design. 

When i was looking for a MVC framework for php, i was looking for something *simple*, *lightweight*, with bells and whistles as an option, not a requirement.  I was also trying to avoid “magic”- i want to know what my app is doing and how it is doing it. You know, give me tools, not a train.

With your last design, I could almost smell that CodeIgniter was what I was looking for as soon as i hit the site- the look and feel was minimalistic, simple, & strikingly graphical.  It was a person, a plug, and the feature set.  A darn fine feature set, at that.  It made me feel like CodeIgniter was something i could just “pick up” and “pick apart”, as opposed to requiring me to immerse myself in it.  A certain dessert-based framework’s website gave me the opposite feeling- “Clever div shapes?  This is going to be such a pain…”

Now your site seems.. err.. a little nondescript.  The logo itself is fine, and fits well with the “igniter” theme.  I like the repetition of the shape within the shape.  But the background color around the flame is a little too light to support the white text very well.  The red text on the reddish brown background on the left is a mistake. Again, I can see how the color palette fits the igniter theme, but in an ironic twist, by using such a small font with so little contrast, you’ve rendered “CodeIgniter is clearly documented” almost invisible to the naked eye. And the feature set, by being rendered in a small font the same size as the pitch above it, just doesn’t make the same impact it used to.

Seriously, control-wheel-down about 4 clicks.  That’s the size of the font you should use.  Then, just get rid of those red links next to your elevator pitch.  The white color stands out very well against the reddish-brown background- just make them your links.  By doing so your site will be more legible, have more visual impact, and you’ll “bullet-proof” the design a bit more to boot.

Just my thoughts.

Jake

this site is so sweet. It looks just like the railsforum.com’s forum. It kind of looks like punbb

Has the “You are not authorized to perform this action” issue been fixed in some way? /me still getting it on threads I *really want to seeeeee* :’(

a.sommervell, old links “got broke”.  When we get a few things sorted out, I can get in there and edit the most important ones to fix them, but in the meantime you’ll need to rely on searching.  Sorry sir.

Thats fine if they’re available when one searches means i’ve probably already read the thread I wanted to get to haha

I imagine getting in there and editing them is a biiiitch so i’m not exactly gonna ask you to do that!

I also love CI but have to say I prefer the old site a lot better.

But my top 3 gripes about the new site are:

1) Why did you break all the old URLs?  This is hugely annoying.  Every thread or post bookmarked from before now is useless.  Really awful.

2) It would have been nice if we were told that our usernames (and passwords?) would be renamed rather than come to the forums one day and find that we couldn’t login because a ci_ had been added to our username without any notification.

3) Agreed, the spacing between topics in the topic list is too large.

#1 by far is the worst though… I guess we’re just stuck with it?

Do appreciate all your other hard work though..
thanks,
-Jim

lol, “really awful”? Need a hobby? haha :p

And even more lol… “It would have been nice if we were told…” dude, I run a community of over 40k users and i’d just LOOOOOVE to have a psychic hotline to all their minds… but I dont, so “notifying people” is pissing in the wind

a.somervell - 19 March 2007 07:09 AM

... I run a community of over 40k users ...

Which community is that?

*only said that to show relevance not to be facetious, although the whole post was a dig @ mr ruffled feathers up there

... http://www.biggie.co.nz

So - are any of my usability issues going to be addressed? If I am wrong that’s one thing, but few are even commenting on them. Sigh, nobody cares about interface design anymore

I guess that’s what I get for bringing up a few quick interface comments in a programmer’s forum. lol.

blackhalobender - 19 March 2007 05:14 PM

So - are any of my usability issues going to be addressed? If I am wrong that’s one thing, but few are even commenting on them. Sigh, nobody cares about interface design anymore

I guess that’s what I get for bringing up a few quick interface comments in a programmer’s forum. lol.

Include a link to your “usability issues” post. There are seven pages of this stuff to wade through. That’s rather too many “Wow!”, “Cool!”, and “Utterly delightful!” for my liking. I needed bug fixes more than I needed a red stripe across the top of the forum. However, my favourite feature of the new design is the SELECT which enables me to use the old design. 

I didn’t address this the first time because the tone of your post caught me off guard.  Since you’ve raised it again I’ll do my best to work through this with you.

Here are the issues I can see you raise.

1.) Mystery tabs - Tabs disappear for no user-centered reason. Probably just an “easy to pull off,” decision based on a back-end decision that should have had NO impact on the interface design.

The wiki and forum are self contained, and while they share some of the navigation and branding features, they don’t share all.  This is partially because they are meant to be self-standing.  Is that what you are talking about?  If so, they are consistent among themselves, and while I agree it might be nice to be fully consistent, I don’t consider it a major issue. Your use of the words “easy to pull off” imply that we are lazy and that just bugs me.

(presuming there even was an interface design)

This was out of line and I’m finding it difficult to respond.  I’m not sure if you were just trying to illicit a response or if you have a deeper point that I’ve missed.  I don’t presume to know what you’ve designed, but our advisory board is a who’s-who of design, and Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain is a brilliant designer very much in tune with issues of usability and affordance.  You are welcome to disagree, but you suggest we didn’t even think of this…

2.) Logo changes function - At some points it takes you back to the home page as it should. In others it takes you to the forum home page.

Within the forum, it takes you to the forum homepage.  Within the site, to the site homepage.  While having the logo link to the homepage is a convention, and a worthwhile suggestion, the underlying sign of good usability is that it empowers the users.  In this case I would suggest that within the forum, linking to the forum homepage is a more frequent action then returning to the main CI site.

Far less important: Color of documentation and forums appear as though they are on a different site. Again, interface decisions being made as the result of a back end decision that should have had no impact on the interface.

As Martin points out, choose whatever forum theme suits you best.  The user guide is the result of a legacy manual that hasn’t been updated.  Good point.