[geeklog-devel] GL 1.5 test site user login

Thu Nov 1 08:14:58 EDT 2007

=MF=Geiss wrote:

>http://geiss.getmyip.com/gl15/

I always thought the theme looked like a cross between the Wordpress
default theme and the iPhone ;-) Take that as an observation, not a
valuation of any kind ...

Anyway, a few things I noticed, in no particular order:

- My browser window is something like 720 pixels wide (canvas size) and
I get a horizontal scrollbar even though there's nothing apparent on the
front page that would need that much space. How good does this theme scale?

I see, for example, that on the calendar index page, the column for
Saturday is partially hidden by the right side block while the colum
heading and the mini calendar above it are overlapping the right side
block (screenshots on request).

- I always thought the Professional theme had too many horizontal lines
thrown in. Have you tried leaving out the horizontal lines between side
blocks and between stories?

- Speaking of side blocks: To me it looks odd that the light grey
background of the left side blocks just ends somewhere in the middle of
the page. Likewise on the right side, only that there are more blocks
there so it's not as obvious. Shouldn't the grey background end flush
with the footer, like it does with the header?

Alternatively, the side blocks could have a proper border at the bottom,
like they do on their right and left side (where they border with the
content area), respectively.

- Looking at the site in Lynx (/me can hear the groans ...) I notice
that the content of both the left and the right side blocks comes first
before you get to the actual site content, e.g. the articles. That could
have some impact with search engines.

This is also something visually impaired users would have to struggle
with. There's an old feature request for this, actually, from which I'm
quoting some portions below:

--- snip ---
Geeklog with professional theme is not very accessible for blind
computer users.
( I am self blind and to use computer I use screenreader JAWS, http://
www.freedomscientific.com)

suggestions:
1. add to header.thtml between <body> and start of content (menu, search
form or ...) 
    <a href="#content_start"><img src="{site_url}/images/speck.gif"
    width="1" height="0" alt="skip navigation"></a>
and to the end of header.thtml
    <a name="content_start" id="content_start"></a>
this modification creates top of the page link with very litle picture
(heigth/width 1:0) and alt text (alt text is visible to the screenreader
users) and anchortag to jump directly to the content area.
string "skip navigation/jump to the content... must be in language file.

(...)

3.
problem with search field (simple search) 
search field don't have descriptive text
possible solution: add to input tag (<input type="text" ... 
title atribute with descriptive text
descriptive tekst from language file
--- snip ---

bye, Dirk

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http://geeklog.info/