Portal Interface

[tenty]

Hey all. I have been a busy little beaver in terms of moving the fourms and making sure everything is all ok and I apologise for the disruptions that have been caused due to the move of servers, but hopefully everything is back in action now and we'll have less down time.

On top of all of this, I have been working on a "portal" interface which is located at

http://forums.oztivo.net/index1.php

and I would like your feedback on what you would like to see on the front page. At present, it shows your login details as per above (the welcome message and the last visited information) and there is also a "News" section so that Administrators and Moderators can post news in regards to the site or current events.

There is also the default search function, and stats on the forums, current active users, and the last 5 "active" forum topics for those who like to fly in and fly out without having to read everything.

If this can be improved in any way, or if you would like to see say a different colour scheme, or the way the layout is handled, please leave feedback below.

Later on this month, I will also be releasing Avatars. For those of your who don't know, this is a fun method of assigning a "User Picture" to yourself and will probably work on the principle of once you get a certain number of posts, you will have access to an avatar. But that's up for discussion.

Cheers
-Edwin

[DavidSymons]

Hi Edwin,

It looks great!

How about swapping the locations of the Search and the Statistics boxes? Most of the time you'll find the search near the top RHS of a site and the statistics don't really need to be in the highest priority position <braces for cluebat attack from Mr Thoms :) >.

Is it possible for others to submit news items that are vetted by Administrators/Moderators? Also, can news items become discussion threads (ie. a Reply button)? Careful though, a move towards OzTiVo-Slashdot may not be what you're wanting to get into.

Thanks and Onya! for your efforts.

Cheers, Dave.

[Darren King]

Looks good! Keep up the good work :)

[tenty]

Hi Edwin,

It looks great!

How about swapping the locations of the Search and the Statistics boxes? Most of the time you'll find the search near the top RHS of a site and the statistics don't really need to be in the highest priority position <braces for cluebat attack from Mr Thoms :) >.
Done.


Is it possible for others to submit news items that are vetted by Administrators/Moderators?
I will need to review whether or not this "should" be possible. I can understand that people might want to make their own news items though.


Also, can news items become discussion threads (ie. a Reply button)? Careful though, a move towards OzTiVo-Slashdot may not be what you're wanting to get into.

Thanks and Onya! for your efforts.

Cheers, Dave.
Made the change. News items are now also discussion threads.

[lagomatic]

Portal looks great and a fantastic idea!

How about listing & linking some of the most common visited articles/hacks from the Main Oztivo Site or web for a quick reference for the newbies. ie Guided Setup, Increase Live Buffer, Add episode to now showing titles, 30 Skip on Remote etc.

As I've found myself, once the vanilla Tivo is installed, you'll quickly want to hack and add some extra functionality and these questions can be answered sometimes without a post.

Cheers

John

[tenty]

How about listing & linking some of the most common visited articles/hacks from the Main Oztivo Site or web for a quick reference for the newbies. ie Guided Setup, Increase Live Buffer, Add episode to now showing titles, 30 Skip on Remote etc.

Ok, so add "Quick Links" to the portal interface. Shall do.

You may have noticed as well that I have added a Poll to this thread. I'd like to change it over next month to the new portal interface but require feedback. The poll results are anonymous, so no one can say "oh so-and-so voted for this, so I guess I have to vote for it too"

Please be aware that you will STILL be able to get to the forums view page if I set the portal interface as the first page you see. As a reminder, the portal interface can be view currently HERE (http://forums.oztivo.net/index1.php)