Windy Gamer's Blog

Yola Evaluation

December 21, 2010
Origins:

The designers of Yola
apparently did not study the DreamWeaver manual to develop the Functional Specification for Yola. As a result, many Ease of Use features that one would expect, like Templates, Page Anchors etc. have been left out of Yola and are now coming to light in Ideas posted to the forum. 

Major issues / bugs:


  1. Choose a link is broken. Firefox 3.6.13. Add image to a photo gallery. Choose Edit and then choose link locks up the browser with a grayed screen.

Minor issues:

  1. Images. I can't add a horizontal spacing tag easily so when the picture is on the right, the text runs into it. That really needs to be in the CSS of course, but I have no visibility of that. Again maybe I need to write my own theme.
  2. Link color: my theme uses a BRIGHT BLUE for links and that's way too hard to read on the black background. I'll need to fix that somehow that does not involve messing with each and every link. Do I have to write my own theme? How can I do that?
  3. Editing a picture in a blog does not have same options as on a page. Left / Right Align etc.
  4. I don't see a way to change the font size of the navigation menu. Sure would be nice. Is that fixed as part of the theme?
  5. Are there instructions for how to write a theme for Yola? [ Yes. Become an expert. There are instructions for building themes. Apparently the themes must be submitted for review or processing. I have yet to study the process in detail.]
  6. On Page Anchors are not available. It is possible to add them by adding HTML widgets to the page and putting in the raw HTML code. But this is not for the faint of heart - or non-expert - among us.
  7. It is possible to modify the look of the theme by adding CSS changes in HTML widgets. However, these need to be added for each page where they are used.
  8. Customized template pages do not exist, but are being considered for implementation.

Long Term Issues
  1. Export of my site so if I want to move I can get all the content out to put somewhere else. Don't trap me in.
  2. Import is great too. But that's not my problem right now.
  3. Styles. Sure would be nice to have styles like Header 2, Header 3, etc. rather than setting the font size directly.  What about Quoted text? I guess I could add a new text box, but not in a blog.
  4. No real support for photo galleries. I need to build a web page with images and text. Manually. There should be a smarter template that goes over multiple pages. Sort of a photo-blog if you will that is smart for photos.
  5. No click through for photos to the original size. I have to make that manually. Photo template needs a setting for thumbnail size.

 

Web Site Builders - The Problem

December 21, 2010
I'm a consultant looking for site builders to recommend to my clients. In the past few years I come across more and more clients who have been held hostage to the old way of doing websites. They can't find the person who built their site, or it costs too much or that person has lost vita information about the site because it has been months or years since they made any changes.

Modern sites require a CMS or Content Management System. There are many out there, but only in the past couple of yea...
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Allods Online - Medieval, Sci-fi MMO - First Impressions

December 20, 2010

First Impressions

There are a number of issues that I tripped across right away that I found confusing or annoying.

  • There is no way to orbit the camera around your character to see your own face. All the MMOs that I've seen before have some way to orbit the camera to see your own character from all sides. The most common way to do this is to use R-Mouse-Hold and move the mouse to orbit the camera. Allods orbits the camera with R-Mouse-Hold, but the character is not static while you do t...

Continue reading...
 

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