new planet!

Posted by ruphy at 14:06 on the 22 of September, 2008 — Categories: Art,Community,KDE,Oxygen.

Yes, the new planet went live finally today, with a new fresh look which takes it out from the last nineties and brings it down directly to the modern times.

The design has started at akademy, on wade’s commission, and then got several rounds of refining and polishing, last of which been done by nuno who was trying to accomodate the usual bikeshed that developers’ taste brings up.¹ ;-)

We still have to work some more on it, pixel perfectionness is the first thing that comes to my mind, then some more fluidity in the layout (thanks to felipe who told me is working on a patch for it), and, most important of all, someone that knows about CSS and HTML that can give a hand. Jonathan has done a terrific work, but, as he says, that’s the best that his web skills permits him. :-)

Then we need to refine all those little things like alignments, shadows, and so on…

Anyways, already a great improvement, no? ;-)

Enjoy the new planet!

- Your beloved Roophie

¹ no offence meant, we already cleared that up, just… history!

23 Comments »

  1. Comment by Dass — September 22, 2008 @ 3:22 pm

    hack the planet! ;-)

  2. Comment by luciusf — September 22, 2008 @ 3:30 pm

    honestly, i don’t like it.
    the old design was just fantastic. the design followed the function (e.g. it used the full size of my monitor as i wanted it). this new style looks somehow childish and oldschool.

    ah, its hard to describe, but no, to me its simple ugly.

    but i might be the only one :-)

  3. Comment by ruphy — September 22, 2008 @ 3:36 pm

    @2:
    I hope so. ;-)
    and… omg, you relly love retro style, don’t you? :D

  4. Comment by Emmanuel Lepage Vallée — September 22, 2008 @ 3:57 pm

    Is it possible to have a 100 width view (not by default bur saved in cookies). I got a 3360×1050 screen and the planet look like a little rubber band on the middle of my screen. 90% (to keep your design intact) or 100% width and +1 font size would be perfect, the rest of the designed is nice.

  5. Comment by ruphy — September 22, 2008 @ 4:05 pm

    @1/4:
    the idea is to get there, at least partly. not as easy as it sounds though… ;-)

  6. Comment by Koko — September 22, 2008 @ 4:06 pm

    3360×1050 is a little bit odd configuration, isn’t it?

  7. Comment by gobab — September 22, 2008 @ 4:25 pm

    Well, the design looks OK, but why so narrow? Please, give us back at least some 80% width. It makes it so much easier to read. Also, many people post pictures that are wider than the current width.
    So please – make it wider. Thanks guys.

  8. Comment by miggols99 — September 22, 2008 @ 5:01 pm

    Yes it is quite easy actually :) Just get the image up in GIMP or whatever image editor you use, and crop the corners and save each as an image like topleft.png or something. For the header, fade it away on the right or tile it. If you fade it (much better looking IMO) put the background colour as the end of the gradient. For the sides make a reeeeeealy long chunk of the sides. It shouldn’t be that big because it will be very thin.

    To make the icons at the top look better, put the line height as the height of the bar for the text.

    You should add some padding to the footer, and put the font size as a percentage, so it scales better on different resolutions. 80% should be ok. You should also make the icons centre with text-align: center.

  9. Comment by Emmanuel Lepage Vallée — September 22, 2008 @ 5:08 pm

    @Koko:
    2x1680x1050, probably the most common (recent) dual screen setup (and I love it). I use firefox on 1 screen only, but it still look like a rubber band in the middle of the screen.

    @ruphy:
    cut the background in 3. The center part can just be a color, it will laod faster. About the corner, place them at left:0% and right:0% on “content” with repear-y. Like that you will be able to shrink/grow the design horizontally. Put the body width at 100% and content at 90%. Like that I think (after a revy quick look at the css) that it will do the job.

  10. Comment by bkor — September 22, 2008 @ 5:27 pm

    Please more the feeds in elinks to the bottom, or just hide them completely.

    I asked this before, but never got a response. A list of feeds is really not interesting in a text browser.

    There are also some problems with the background of various images. The hackergotchi’s sometimes have a white background while the design doesn’t use white ATM. Similar for the ‘KDE Dot News’ (gray background but it should be white).

  11. Pingback by New planet and how Wade didn’t help « Komandeering Developers Everywhere — September 22, 2008 @ 5:41 pm

    [...] 22, 2008 Hey everyone, as Ruphy notes here, the new Planet redesign is in place.  This is something that Franz, Ruphy, Physos and I discussed [...]

  12. Comment by Jakob Petsovits — September 22, 2008 @ 7:05 pm

    Awesome. The only nitpicking that I can think of would be:

    1. Don’t duplicate the “Planet RSS” link in the icon left to “Add your blog”, but link it to the bugs.kde.org link too. actions/feed-subscribe would make a splendid icon there :)

    2. The Dot icon is accurate with the Dot’s native favicon, but looks a little out of place there. I think a white background instead of gray might already do wonders.

    Minor nitpicking, though. The overall looks are just sooo much better. For reference, I second the fontsize += 1 wish.

  13. Comment by Sirius — September 22, 2008 @ 9:50 pm

    Congrats with a new planet :-)

    I’ve been a few days without planetkde, the link I have in my bookmarks didn’t “work” properly. I know a lot of the posts on http://www.kdedevelopers.org are in common with planetkde so I visited kdedevelopers.org and found some posts referring to “new planetkde”. Huh? I clicked the link ‘planetkde.org’ which works properly, and then I found that my bookmark is ‘www.planetkde.org’ which redirects to ‘developer.kde.org’. A bug?

  14. Comment by Henry — September 22, 2008 @ 11:18 pm

    So what, exactly, are you looking for in CSS and HTML help? A quick perusal has it looking fine by my eye. What kind of changes/enhancements need to be made?

  15. Comment by Henry — September 22, 2008 @ 11:20 pm

    Oh, BTW, Firebug reports an ‘unterminated string literal’. It looks like you have a newline where Firebug doesn’t like it. On this page, it’s in digg_bodytext.

    HTH!

  16. Comment by Flo — September 23, 2008 @ 12:41 am

    [X] Yes! At least 80% width pls!

  17. Comment by luciusf — September 23, 2008 @ 1:32 am

    hey, i just sent you an email with a picture in it, which tries to describe what i dislike (and tried to circumscribe @2)
    cheers

  18. Comment by mutlu — September 23, 2008 @ 2:09 am

    Hey Ruphy! Great job! The new planet looks awsome. :)

  19. Comment by Joseph Reagle — September 23, 2008 @ 12:56 pm

    This is what I suggested in an email:

    [[

    [I keep a relatively narrow browser window and the text flows off the right side] … This faux-page thing is a dreadful design idea in terms of usability and accessibility — unless you are super skilled at CSS. I tried simply removing “width: 810px;” but then on large displays the text flows to the right into a new off-color background. The other thing about Planet KDE has always been the huge list of contributors at the front, which is also bad for accessibility — annoying on my PDA and dreadful for the blind using screen readers. After some more tweaks I gave up on this particular CSS.

    *However*, if you look at my blog, I do have an image bar, but it actually expands with the width of the browser:introducing minimal horizontal distortion in all but extreme cases — which is still preferable to text running off the side. Also, my annoying stuff is actually at the bottom of the page but brought up as a left column via CSS.
      http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/

    For Planet, I recommend something like this:
      http://open.wikiblogplanet.com/
    Stick the KDE gears/logo on the upper-right, all the contributors are actually at the bottom of the page, and their CSS is valid except for misspelling “gray”. It flexibly accommodates any page size.
    ]]

  20. Comment by Chris — September 23, 2008 @ 4:38 pm

    Am I the only one that was constantly trying to find out why planetkde.org was done? Until I realised that from now one you have to add a www. to it?

  21. Comment by Chris — September 24, 2008 @ 4:50 am

    was done
    = was down

    Actually http://planetkde.org worked before.

  22. Comment by Michael — September 26, 2008 @ 7:20 pm

    I couldn’t find a contact address on the planet homepage, so try it here, as you seem to be involved in the new planet thing.

    First of, I like the new look, well done! :)

    The problem I have, though, is that akregator now shows a lot of posts two or even three times. Not all, but quite some. They usually appear a bit later a second time in the artikel list. Of course this might be an akregator bug, but I haven’t seen it before (Using Akregator 1.2.5, KDE3, for ages actually).

  23. Comment by Eugene — October 20, 2008 @ 8:00 pm

    Nice article. Thanks. :) Eugene

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