# Drupal Cubing Theme



## JBCM627 (Dec 14, 2009)

Project #1 of my winter break...

At my current job, some of what I do has involved creating or modifying themes for drupal. But I've never done much original design, only implementation of other people's ideas - so I've never done a design completely from scratch. Until now; I'm trying to create a theme to use on future competition sites.

So here is what I currently have:
http://koii.cubingusa.com/template/
Any suggestions to improve usability or design would be appreciated  The site is a demonstration of what a competition site could look like, although things like the registration form don't work.


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## Anthony (Dec 14, 2009)

I think it's great, Jim!
Once you can get everything to work (e.g. the registration form) it will be nearly perfect imo. Very basic design, but it looks nice and is easy to use.

For all the Texas competitions we've always used this general design: http://texasspeedcubing.org/events/2009austinfall.php
Yours looks better. 

The only thing I would think I would want to add to it if it was for one of our competitions is a place to add cut-off times. You may not need them, but we always have to have them in order to stay on schedule.

Are you planning on just using this template for KOII competition websites or releasing it for anyone to use?


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## JBCM627 (Dec 14, 2009)

Anthony said:


> I think it's great, Jim!
> Once you can get everything to work (e.g. the registration form) it will be nearly perfect imo.


Thanks 
Actually registration is tied into the CubingUSA system (for KOII at least), so it is the same thing as Bryan's form, with the same functionality, just reformatted a bit. Although since it is just a template/demo, it is only a mockup form, so it doesn't actually do anything.



Anthony said:


> Are you planning on just using this template for KOII competition websites or releasing it for anyone to use?


I might release it as a drupal theme, but I'd still like to make some improvements first. As you noted, it is still pretty plain... I'd like to add at least some things to make it a bit less so. Even if I don't release it as a drupal theme, I'll probably make the template files available.


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## Carson (Dec 16, 2009)

Just gonna throw out a lot of random thoughts, feel free to ignore any/all.

On the competitors page, it would be nice to have the column labels duplicate every 20 entries or so. With very many competititors, you have to scroll up and down to see what events the columns represent.

How many events will fit onto the competitors page? Will the frame scroll if you have more events than it will hold?

There is always a thread here at speedsolving related to each competition. It would be a neat feature to have a link somewhere on the page to that thread and possibly have the last couple posts from that thread right on the page. Would that have to be written as a separate drupal module?

Are you going to utilize the usual shoutbox?

Kind of hard to describe, but where the pages are centered... the location of the center varies based on whether the page has a scrollbar or not. This makes the location of the menu and main page vary slightly when moving to a scrolling to non-scrolling page.

A page for liveresults/livecams?

A nice script to load a random pic on each page load/refresh would be cool.


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## JBCM627 (Dec 16, 2009)

Carson said:


> Just gonna throw out a lot of random thoughts, feel free to ignore any/all.


Thanks for the suggestions.



Carson said:


> On the competitors page, it would be nice to have the column labels duplicate every 20 entries or so. With very many competititors, you have to scroll up and down to see what events the columns represent.
> 
> How many events will fit onto the competitors page? Will the frame scroll if you have more events than it will hold?


Hmm. Instead of outputting every 20th line though, I have another idea... 

Right now when the table overflows, it just overflows off the side. I might make it scroll.



Carson said:


> and possibly have the last couple posts from that thread right on the page. Would that have to be written as a separate drupal module?


That is actually a really cool idea. But unfortunately, while Drupal does have a build-in aggregator, it doesn't look like vBulletin will generate feeds for individual threads. I may put a link up at least.



Carson said:


> Are you going to utilize the usual shoutbox?
> A page for liveresults/livecams?


Yes to both, but this is just a demo site 



Carson said:


> A nice script to load a random pic on each page load/refresh would be cool.


Or a competition-specific title, but I can't come up with a way to display this that I like.


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