#199 Interface and Usability refresh for ask.fedoraproject.org
Closed: Invalid 3 years ago by duffy. Opened 12 years ago by sundaram.

Ask Fedora is a community edited knowledge base, a forum oriented towards just questions and answers. A test instance is running at

http://ask01.dev.fedoraproject.org:8888/questions/

Upstream css file is at

http://fpaste.org/FdSm/raw/

If anyone is interested, let me know and I can make you a admin for the test instance and you can experiment with the css via the admin settings which allows for a custom css file which overrides parts of the default css file as necessary.

A logo would also be nice since we want to promote this site without the restrictions associated with the Fedora logo


ignore that logo.. I messed up the export

Is the plan to keep the name "Askbot"? If so, is the desire to keep the robot theme of the current mascot/logo?

Replying to [comment:2 kirkb]:

Is the plan to keep the name "Askbot"? If so, is the desire to keep the robot theme of the current mascot/logo?

Nevermind, a little more reading and it looks like askbot is the upstream project, so Ask Fedora will be the name here (ask.fedoraproject.org)

An idea for the AskFedora mascot
mascot.png

Hey, thanks for the mascot proposal. I like it and I have provided a update on the status of the project at https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2011-September/004966.html

niftyness, if you attach a new copy of the logo proposal, that would be great

Another project that Red Hat sponsors already uses a owl (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/POSSE). I think a different animal as mascot would be the way forward.

Hi Ryan,

Are you still working on this? I think only the footer needs to be completed. Would you have time to finish that up so I can apply the theme to the production instance?

Btw, I used the staging instance from my cell and the doesn't seem to scale. The search box overlaps it. Would you be able to make the logo autoscale depending on the browser window to fix this?

Thanks,
Ankur

sadin, suchakra, and banas have been working on this design. They have a repo on our github page available here: https://github.com/fedoradesign/askbot-test

More updates:

Version of redesign plan in plain text : http://suchakra.in/random/redesign-plan.txt
[[BR]]
This one will be regularly updated.

Just updating:

So far, the plan is that we'll mentor one student over the summer period towards the completion of the project. Suchakra and I hosted a quick discussion with one of the prospective students, minutes of which are available here: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/glittergallery/2015-03-25/glittergallery.2015-03-25-12.00.html. We've currently assigned the student some warm up tasks to get her up to speed and also evaluate her in the process. She has some work here: http://askbot-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com/. She hit some roadblocks, which IIRC we helped resolve.

There have been several other students too, some of which we did keep in touch with over email, but so far this one seems more promising.

Much earlier, Suchakra and I were running some flexboxy experiments on http://sarupbanskota.github.io/askfedora-frontend/, which will obviously be broken on non-new browsers because there's no polyfills (it's intended, we were just playing around).

So.. that's about it, sorry for not having updated this thread. We had crazy discussions over personal email, I should have remembered to gist those here. Next time :)

Thanks!

Hi Sarup! It's been 4 weeks so we're just looking for an update. Has the GSoC selection process finished yet so do you have a confirmed gsoc student to work on this?

Anuradha Welivita is the GSoC student working on this project this summer:

http://anuradhanotes.blogspot.com/search/label/GSoC

Assigning this ticket to her!

Hi everyone, I have worked on some mockups for this project which can be viewed here at my blog - http://anuradhanotes.blogspot.com/search/label/GSoC

And also I have set up a repository in fedoradesign github where I have pushed my current work on the mockups - https://github.com/fedoradesign/Askbot-mockups

I would like to have some feedback on my work and would like to know the changes that I may need to do in the designs and what additions that I may have to include further. Thanks in advance.

Just pinged Anuradha for an update in email.

Hi, I have currently coded 6 pages according to my mockups which you can find here: http://askfedoratest-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com. And these are not the final ones because still there are some small things to be fixed in those pages.

And for some time I met with some issues on overriding templates and styles in AskBot. And it is only a few days ago I got those issues resolved through help from the IRC. And currently I am working on the integration. I hope to get the integration done as soon as possible and move on to coding of other pages as well.

After the hackfest in FudCon, Pune on AskFedora UX/UI and functionality overhaul my mentors Suchakra and Sarup have collected some feedback and they are preparing a detailed report on the feedback received. Once I get the report we will discuss more on what changes are need to be done.

Anuradha - your test pages look fantastic ! Great job :) I'm glad to see such wonderful progress!

Thank you very much. Any feedback on these pages are welcome :)

Hey Anuradha, as a head's up: Lenka (lhorakov) who is one of our UX designers in Brno is going to do a full review of your prototype and design documents and give you some feedback here.

Okay, I will be looking forward to receive that feedback.

Feedback to ASK Fedora Project Redesign
svgs (feedback).zip

Hi!
So I reviewed Ask Fedora Mockups – also .png-s from GitHub. I added here a .zip where are my suggestions. You can realize it if you will consider it right, or not, it's up to you. :)

BUT I have to say that you have done a LOT of work, so please take my feedback as optional advises and notice that I'm not criticizing you just trying to improve it even more. Really nice work and good job!

Hi, thank you so much for the feedback :) I'm going through the comments that you have mentioned and I realize that they are really useful. I am currently doing the integration of the main page with the testing instance I have at Openshift and I will incorporate what you have mentioned when doing that and will change the other pages too. Thanks a lot for the suggestions to make them better :)

And by the way I have changed the user page a bit because my mentors asked me to do so. That is different from what I have in the mockups. That page can be viewes here: http://askfedoratest-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com/user

how are we doing with this one now that GSoC is over?

Hi, well I have pushed all my code with the new styles I have used to override the existing templates and styles in askbot to fedora-design which you can find here: [https://github.com/fedoradesign/askfedora-redesign]. Now it's open for anyone to contribute and a list of issues which needs fixing can also be found there. I have worked on solving some of the issues and will be working on the others. After GSoC I have been quite busy studying for end exams and I will be resuming my work on the project soon after the exams which will be mid of next month. Hope it is not too long and I will be keeping in touch though.

awesome, great work anuradhaw and thanks for the update! sundaram do you know how we can get this pushed to prod?

puiterwijk is looking at deploying the new styles to ask.fpo stage... he will revert if it causes issues. anuradhaw, if there are issues we'll wait to redeploy until you have more time after exams to take a look any any breakage. It does look like there will be some problems initally because puiterwijk says your fixes are built for a newer version of askbot than we have deployed.

Okay, this is now up in stage now. puiterwijk had to make some minor changes to your code to make it work properly; i merged the pull requests for that (hope that was okay.)

you can see it in stage here:
https://ask.stg.fedoraproject.org

There are a few minor issues, like the footer floating off to the far right of the page, that I think need to be addressed before it could be pushed to prod at ask.fedoraproject.org. We can leave this up in stage for you to look at and when you have time to fix, let us know and puiterwijk can sync it with your repo to grab any fixes and hopefully push to production.

hey anuradhaw - we're waiting on you to make the tweaks to the stg version of your code before pushing it to prod. there is no rush, just wanted to make sure you knew this.

Hi,

I share this in the meeting today and mo suggest me to share it in here too.
This my idea for the askfedora redesign currently for mobile, I can do it also for desktop if needed https://jurankdankkal.fedorapeople.org/askfedora/ask-fedora-redesign.jpg

Hi,

Yes I know about it. And sorry I am bit late because I had to catch up with some work. But in this weekend I will have some time to work on it. I will update you with the progress.

And I also found the mockup done by jurankdankkal interesting and may be we can do some changes based on that.

I worked on some issues related to some of the styles which are broken and on images which did not show up and now they work fine. It was basically due to a problem in static file reference.

The other styles (with the footer, tertiary header etc.) worked fine on my local instance but at the stage I am afraid the styles and seem to get overridden by some other styles. For example a file named custom.css seems to be overriding the styles for .tabsA class etc.

Thanks, @anuradhaw!

The folks at the team meeting took a look at https://ask.stg.fedoraproject.org/en/questions/ and had a few thoughts. The date, answers and votes menu seem randomly arranged, the language menu is oddly placed and the green of the ask button against the blue background is a bit jarring. We know it's a work in progress though and look forward to seeing where it is at at the next meeting :)

Hi folks, I managed to re-setup the askbot instance which I used to demo my styling work which is at http://askbotfedoratest-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com/questions. It was populated with trash users and I had to truncate the entire database and start over. There you can see that what you have mentioned above work fine.

Q/A page - http://askbotfedoratest-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com/question/1/what-is-recomended-for-ocr-in-fedora
User page - http://askbotfedoratest-anuradhaw.rhcloud.com/users/1/kalpani

Actually the same code is pushed to the repo at https://github.com/fedoradesign/askfedora-redesign. And at the stage if you login as the admin user and select 'askfedoratheme' as the Skin under '''settings -> Skin, logos and HTML parts''', I think the styles should work without breaking :)

Hi anuradhaw! Thanks for the update - I have contacted puiterwijk and he is going to update ask.stg.fedoraproject.org with the updated theme. Once it's up on staging, I will let you know here - can you test it out in staging so we can figure out if it's ready for production?

Hi duffy! Yes please let me know once it's on staging so that I can check it out and say if it's production ready.

the theme is still not on staging, we have to move one with this, please take a look at #448 they request an ad for FedoraMagazine.

anuradhaw - can you reach out to puiterwijk directly and work with him to get it in staging?

hey @anuradhaw - just in case you didn't see the last message- still interested in this?

Oh sorry about that. Sure I will get in touch with puiterwijk soon as possible and will get it in staging.

@duffy - With the help of puiterwijk we got it in staging once again. You can access it at https://ask.stg.fedoraproject.org/en/questions.

It had some issues due to some of the new styles getting overridden by the styles in custom.css file. After removing those styles it fixed most of the problems. But I identified 4 other issues which still exist at the staging, which are:

  1. Alignment of links in the tertiary header in the landing page
  2. Width of the footer in the landing page
  3. New styles for "tags" are not getting applied for the "tags" in the right aside of the landing page
  4. Facebook icon not getting displayed in the login page

So, have to look into those as well.

@anuradhaw any updates on the 4 issues in staging?

Anyone still maintaining this? Remember talking about it when I was out for the Design FAD a while back. Glad to see its still here, is there still a desire to move forward with this?

Now that Ask is dead, long live Ask* — I'm guessing this can probably be closed?

* – (A Discourse® Family Website™)

@duffy

Sorry I'm not part of the design TEAM but I've got some comment on this:

  1. there is a lot of effort by the design TEAM planning a new set of icons and theme for the new site askfedora on discourse....
  2. the old instance of askfedora also called askbot is in read-only mode and I think is not needed anymore because now is almost obsolete and it is there only for references.

I think this ticket can be closed and don't double effort.. although great work from all the members involved in this ticket

+1 for close....

Regards.,

Metadata Update from @duffy:
- Issue close_status updated to: Invalid
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

3 years ago

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