The next Glest Guide version is under development as a major change that will completely rewrite everything and will make future updates easier!
So, first of all, I'm rewriting all the pages with valid XHTML and CSS3 (it's very messy, old code, as someone mentioned earlier
), with compatibility for IE7+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera (and if it works on them, it should work on nearly every other browser). The layout is nearly the same, but the content and coding is being rewritten for efficiency.
Now, the first change that will be noticeable besides the content changes will be the drop down menu. This will make navigation far easier because it's no longer based on the front page (which will be changed, as per below), but from every page, and allows more room for expansion, as well as categorization of the pages.
Nextly, as mentioned above, the main page will be changed to a professional style. In fact, that's the biggest change. All the content across all pages will be rewritten, focusing on professionalism, clarity, neutral point of view, and multiple options. I do particularily plan to showcase many different Blender techniques, and hope to get the support of fellow modelers here in explaining in depth and with images their modeling techniques (*cough*john*cough*).
The MDC will become something more akin to download.com's style, rather than be a giant, ever growing list, it will be tabbed based, searchable, and split into pages. Of course, it will still be XML based and you can edit articles like before, but I plan to add the ability to comment in addition to rate, as well as allow images to be uploaded and processed.
Ads will probably make a showcase, because if the site becomes popular enough, it's going to have to be paid for. The ads would be customly as unobtrusive as possible, and just there to support the GG, the same as every other site that has ads.
Now another major change, the way URLs work! This is going to make adding new pages easier, as well as reduce page size. You see, like many sites, such as this forum board, it'll just be the index page and everything else is included via parameters. For example, the home page can be either glestguide.co.cc or glestguide.co.cc/?go=home. The part after the equal sign defines how pages will work. For example, ?go=mdc would be the link to the MDC. This makes the site easier to control because formerly, if I wanted to change the layout of the site, I would have to edit EVERY page. Now, I'd just have to edit the index page. Each individual page only actually contains the content area and a few javascripts to modify the title of the page, etc;
Of course, the site will become a lot more javascript based. I'm adopting the syntax highlighter instead of manually doing it, which will make for neater, easier code there, as well as things like pop up boxes, tooltips, etc will appear to describe how to do things. Lightboxes are moving to the Slimbox script, which is faster, smaller size, and easier to customize, while still doing everything the lightbox can do.
Nextly, the branches of the GG, including the
scenario creator,
romans, and
elves pages will be brought up to date, and the scenario creator will be refactored and fixed (it's currently broken. Notice the stylesheet is not linking correctly due to a change in the page's code).
In short, there's a lot of changes to come, and it will take a while. Finals are just mopping up now (at the time of writing, english final is tomorrow, and is the last one), so I hope to have more time on my hands soon. Please comment or suggest additional things.
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