Website Irritants

Post comments on things about the website that you find irritating.  I cannot promise to fix them, but I will do my best.

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nhoeller's picture

Change Notification

The current change notification e-mail is hard to read, does not display a consistent amount of text, and does not flag what text has changed.

I will investigate changing to MIME-formatted e-mail and also look for more sophisticated notification modules.

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nhoeller's picture

Image Support

It is possible to upload images through the rich-text FCKeditor.  The process is quite convoluted.  A more serious problem is lack of decent image resizing.  Although large images can be resized within the editor, the full image is still downloaded on each page request. 

The Drupal Imagecache module provides better image handling but 'out of the box' does not support user-specific image directories (all images end up in a common directory).  I will investigate how this capability can be added.

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nhoeller's picture

File Attachments

Files can be attached to documents, but not to comments.  It is possible to upload and link to files within the rich-text FCKeditor - the steps are not obvious. 

The Drupal Comment Upload appears to solve the first requirement. 

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Sherry's picture

Links and where they open

It would be very helpful if when you click on a link, it doesn't take you away from the Bioinspired! website, but instead takes you to another window. When I sent out the announcement for the Biomimicry in Higher Education Webinar in January, I chose the option to link to another window, but I noticed it doesn't do that. Is there a way to do it and if not, can you make it possible?

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nhoeller's picture

re: Links and where they open

Sherry, there is a lot of controversy about how links should be handled.  Should Links Open In New Windows? covers some of the issues.  Unfortunately, the HTML standard is moving towards making it difficult to have links open in a new window.  According to Standards Compliant Opening HTML Links In A New Window, the target attribute that many web developers now use is no longer supported in HTML 4 Strict.  There is a workaround but that requires Javascript and some people disable Javascript for security reasons. 

I agree with the position that the best option is to leave the choice up to the user - most browsers support a right-click context menu that allows the link to be opened in a new tab/window.  Even faster, the Ctl+click shortcut works in both Firefox and IE to open the link in a new tab.

 

 

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