Rails Tutor Design

[curtismchale]

Below is a link to the rails tutor design i have been working on. I
admit there are a few things I don't love about the design at this
time but I think we can make them better with some feedback. I really
like the main background (but wonder if the 'florishes' should be
pulled back a bit). The Railstutor 'logo' needs some work. Really it
is just text at this point. I thought some more discussion on that
would be good and then I can go back and start to work on it while the
site is being built.

Anyway lets get some feedback and I'll do a revision.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/curtismchale/3622811199/

[Dana Jones]

Thanks for the work you've done on this Curtis. I like the "cleanness"
of it - I see a trending back to that on a lot of websites lately. I
think there are a few important elements missing, though.

1) A logo. I would love if Rails Tutor had some kind of graphical logo
we could use on promotional items. Anybody here got graphic artist
chops?
2) The home page. The landing page is the one truly non-standard-
Redmine page the website has to offer. It will still need to fit
within the Redmine "frame", but we can partition that home page into
divs for the sections we talked about (how to help, spotlighted
topics, link to RailsBridge, etc.) in ways that we can't really do on
other pages.
3) Redmine layout restrictions. Redmine already has a tabbed interface
(see https://projects.littlestreamsoftware.com/projects/rails-tutor )
that we could probably style to some extent, but not a whole lot. For
us to make any significant changes (beyond color and logo) we'd have
to touch almost all of the views in the application, which is too
ambitious a project for us at this point, with the small team we have.

Let's concentrate on putting together a logo, if possible, and a
kickass layout for the home page. We can deploy that with the new
Redmine site, and build on it from there as the need arises. That
sound ok?

Dana

[Kent Fenwick]

Hey guys,

Not to add complexity here, but is there a reason why we are hosting it with Redmine?

I don't mind hosting a more custom site, I have a lot of server space, then we can point to the Redmine project.

What do you think?

Kent

--

++
Kent Fenwick
http://blog.ewakened.com
http://twitter.com/kentf

[Dana Jones]

We need something with the ability to serve the courseware, handle logins/logouts, be updated by multiple authors and editors, easily embed images, have a discussion forum, etc. We had the discussion open for awhile about what to use and Redmine was the only thing that was really nominated. So we finally pulled the trigger and made the decision to go with something stable that we could customize enough to suit our needs, and that was Redmine. The problem isn't really hosting or server space - Larkware's providing that for free - it's all the other stuff. :)

Dana

[curtismchale]

Sorry for not getting in on this. It seems after talking with
Jschoolcraft I was waiting for more direct feedback while Dana was
waiting for me. I hope to revamp this tomorrow (client work first
though). If not tomorrow this weekend.