The New Look Isn't Complete
So, unless you've never been here before you'll notice that there is a prominent new feature. A persistent side bar on the left which contains some useful links. This has been something I've wanted of MoinMoin for a long time because from watching the PersonalTelco access logs it became apparent that people would arrive at our wiki via a link or search engine, read the page and then leave because they had no idea what we were about or how to find anything. Sadly both of my previous attempts were only marginally sucessful, however this hack for the DRSRM site by ReimerBehrends is wonderful, and I hope it will help visitors get oriented much faster. If you are interested in playing with it you can find more information on the MoinMoin SkinMarket page.
As I rarely have the hours to spend dinking with the nicities of this site in one chunk I've decided to do a MarkPilgrim style redesign, which means you all get to watch the good and the bad as it progreses. Please bear with me as I experiment and please feel free to comment.
You may have also noticed that on the main ThinkingSpace page there were new posts appearing from BrettShand as well as myself. This was part of a new experiment at combining blogs on the front page, a very small scale communal blog aggregator. Sadly the current method I use to include blog entries means that they end up getting included by name rather then date ... so Brett's posts were slowly pushing mine out. I'll be working on a proper solution to this, in the mean time I've reverted it back to just my posts (sorry Dad!).
Comments
I think I can stand it 
Dad.
I think you're heading in the right direction. Now if you can just combine the universal leftnav and the homepage rightnav into a single leftnav universal include... maybe seperate navigation into Spack and Wiki sections, with all the Orphan/CategoryCategory/RefactorMe/etc links in Wiki and the most important links from the right nav in Spack along with FindPage, RecentChanges, ThinkingSpace etc. -- GeneMerrill
Yep, my intention is to try and do something like that. I'd been thinking of ditching the "User" category and then having "Navigation", "Action" and "Contribute" sections. I think I like your "Wiki" better then "Action". I kinda also want to do a "Featured" section which shows off some of the best pages, and then a users section which shows off peoples blogs or something. Anyway, step by step ...
-- Adam.
Totally! Gotta take baby steps. You've already pushed MoinMoin far past what I thought it could do... I think you should keep the Action category, though perhaps LocalSiteMap doesn't belong in there, and also have a Wiki section with all the RecentChanges/Orphan/etc links. Is MoinMoin still a PITA to change the look and feel? -- GeneMerrill
Hrm, okay that's a good idea. Site links, Wiki nav links and page actions. Hopefully that's fairly sensible. Moin *is* still a PITA to customize but they are working on it (see SkinMarket). In this case they guys whose skin I pinched did a much smarter hack then I did with PersonalTelco and managed to keep everything contained within a customized CascadingStyleSheets and the moin_config.py file. So upgrading shouldn't be nearly as painful as it was for PTP. -- Adam.
Love the changes. I'm also glad you turfed the 'hacker' logo. Radioactive head beats Glider And now that I just finished stealing your layout for my wiki, I think I'm going to have to steal it again! - SimonRyan
Yeah I can't seem to get over my fondness for the toxic head.
Please feel free to steal as much of the look and feel as you want (I stole much of it to start with!), I would like to see what you come up with though. Is your site on the web somewhere? -- Adam. Thanks for that. Unfortunately the server I have it on is already flat chat with apache, php, mysql, mailscanner, sendmail etc etc etc. So I can't afford to make it public at the moment
Its just bit of a thought space for the time being anyway. Maybe once MoinMoin works with modpython or similar, the performance hit wont be so bad. - I've almost been tempted to hack MoinMoin and add some sort of internal caching via a light weight CGI-stub, but I think its the actual fork which is the killer on my server, since I'm running many UML servers on one single processor Rackspace box