Images in recent posts, part 2

[kevin]

This is purely an aesthetic request. IMHO i think this would look the best.
If someone ever does make a plugin for images to show in recent posts, I'd like it to look something like this.

First image of the post, moved to the top of the post, followed by 60 chars or one to three lines of text. Bonus points if you can crop the bottom of images so that they're at max 4:3 ratio. (most images will either be 6:19 or 4:3. rare occasion you'll get a poster or a meme)

[psychobunny]

Haha love the subtext you've managed to quote me on in the pic

Yeah great idea. @trevor had a similar idea for the category view. What would you do there?

[kevin]

Haha sorry i just grabbed one really quick. I can make a template tomorrow but for now, this is how i would organize information by page.

• Splash page

  • Categories
    1. Two or three Thread titles, in order of most recently responded.
       • Date of reponse

• Category page, looks like a blog (deus.com.au) for instance

  • Threads in order of most recently responded
    1. Original post, embedded image/video/song
    2. Original post blurb about the thread, favorite count,
    3. Reply count, icon role-call of who's contributing to the thread (vanilla BB does this)

• Thread pages

  • I think these should have different layouts for different categories. For instance a category dedicated to youtube videos might be best served by a two collumn page, first collumn is 70% of the page with the enlarged video, or even a gallery. With a post collumn next to it

[finid]

@kevin

This sounds good. It'll be great if thread pages have sidebars.

[julian]

... again with the sidebars (chuckle)

(In all seriousness, though, that's the best way to keep an issue in the front of our minds... otherwise we would've forgotten about it ages ago. Not to encourage you or anything (think)...)

[finid]

@julian

I'm in love with sidebars. My car has one. There's one on either side of the house. Heck, even my bike has a sidebar

But seriously, no more posts from me about sidebars until NodeBB 1.0 is released and you guys are all gazillionaires like that Facebook guy.

[psychobunny]

And apparently according to screenshot in OP that's when I sue

[kevin]

This post is deleted!

[kevin]

Haha. The issue i see with sidebars, at least in this theme, is that youre all going for minimalism, which means chopping all redundancy of info out of each page. If you can see all recent replies on the category page, you dont need it on the thread page too.

I could be wrong though. Node does several things i never wouldve thought of doing, which is good. No forum puts the actual replies on the front page. And nobody decontextualizes those replies by not saying at least the name of the thread.

Its very different and im trying to figure out peoples reactions to it. It might be more natural, since people rarely care about what started a conversation, and only care about the last thing said.

[psychobunny]

yeah. there's a ton of information available in the API so a theme developer really could go nuts and put all sorts of information that they want on the page. It really depends on your style and I'll be honest and say I'm not actually a designer by trade, which is reflected in the three core themes we have released so far. Really my goal here is to set a few examples so an actual proper designer can make some solid themes (ex. @trevor) and then we can go from there

Really, just need you guys to help spread the word and help recruit some more theme designers to give this platform a shot

[kevin]

Im doing my best to get the word out. Eventually ill have a bit more time to take a crack at theming. A bit more api to accommodate featured and favorited threads and you could really turn this into a massive-community-propagated-blog. That would put you over just about any web software out there.