Extra Extra

Blue-throated swallows in Bas Congo

This is a test post of the new design for Extra Extra. (A sandbox to play with before importing content.)

Inspiration: Apple, Rising Voices, Tumblr, co.mments

“I walk slowly but never backwards.” Abraham Lincoln

Overall objectives:

• clean and tidy inside and out – e.g. plenty of white space, no clutter, strip out redundant bits of custom stylesheet
• latest versions of Wordpress (currently up-to-date) & K2 (upgrade to RC 4)
• minimise changes to K2 core files to make upgrades easier
• xhtml/w3c standards compliant
• snappy loading
• accessible, including for mobile/iPhone access
• should work in all browsers

Header:

• Shadowy, glowing ready-brek man, back by popular demand!
• Fix the header for IE!!!
• Header image needs cleaning/smoothing to lose grey line in Nav Bar
• Adjust spacing of navigation menu to align with title
• Header menu should indicate current page – just yellow text, no background
• Round corners of search box + enlarge box / reduce icon size
• Search box appears to change size when clicked – should ‘thicken outward’
• Search box doesn’t quite align vertically with sidebar (position feed button & search box with the stylesheet, not header.php?)
• Search entry text should be larger & dark grey e.g. 757575
• Turn off Nice Tooltips for internal links, or use it to force new title attributes for header menu (Home, Archives, About, Links)
• Fix header in Safari (displaces the title)
• Search box background doesn’t appear in IE6 (IE7 is OK)
• Search box background doesn’t clear when clicked in IE7

Sidebar:

• Sidebar should align vertically with search box and horizontally with 1st line or top of photo of 1st post
• Restore pale grey boxes/rounded corners around sidebar sections (see CSS)
• Get rid of feed icon in Recent Posts box
• IE6 chops off left edge of boxes
• Use K2 Sidebar manager if poss
• Tidy up CSS margin, padding, etc
• Sidebar headers should have same left margin as contents
• Find a way to make nice background boxes
• On hover, highlight the whole line, not just the text

Posts/entries:

• Icons (except clock) have disappeared, despite various edits of image paths in CSS
• Format blockquotes – pale grey background, smaller, etc
• Lose the clock icon: end of each post should just have the date & place (category) on the left and comments on the right (other details e.g. tags, trackback etc to appear when post permalink is clicked)
• Larger titles?
• Stop categories from being transformed to lower case
• Add co.mments thing as on current version
• Make metadata font & links more distinctive

Comments, footer, etc:

• Sort out comments CSS: lose clock ico, put date and time on same line as author, reduce space between author ID and comment, and comments should be distinct from content
• On the comments list, the edit icon overlaps the comment icon
• Format my replies differently
• Comment & contact forms should have more specific CSS id, so as not replicate search box format (border, width)
• But, as with search box, form should clear/focus when clicked
• Text when using the form should be larger and dark grey

Footer etc

• Style the footer navbar (lose the right hand bar)
• Use Related Posts and Landing Sites plugins
• And a favicon
• Add meta info to header.php
• Review colours of Nice Tooltips plugin for link titles

Pages

• Make pages – copy content across
• Subject should not be required for the Contact Form (on ‘Here’ page)
• Contact Form should have its own format – currently replicates search box
• Redesign links and archives pages?
• Make a simple Lightbox gallery page (invisible until activated) e.g.

Wordpress / K2

• Upgrade to K2 rc4
• Minimise hacking of K2 files (other than header.php) to make upgrades easier
• K2 Sidebar Manager tab doesn’t appear in admin panel
• Moblog: set up a function to autopost photos & text from a specified RSS feed (like this) – may be possible with Reblog
• Import posts, comments, pages, etc from previous version (NB sidebars may need to be copied manually)
• Complete transfer to new server with original url – check image paths and internal links