[cart3r]

This is a sideproject I’ve been working on for a while that I put into production very recently. It’s a web site for students where they can collaborate on assignments, share work, get work reviewed, ask questions etc. When I was an undergrad I always wanted a site like this; unfortunately, there really wasn’t one available. So, once I graduated (about 2 months ago), I decided to start putting one together.

The site is run on BBPress. The theme is completely custom, and it required lots of tweaking – both to template files and to some core files to get it to work more or less how I wanted. If you have any questions about how I did something with this theme let me know.

Also, if I may plug it, I had an idea for a unique advertising model (I think) that I couldn’t let go to waste – inspired by the million dollar homepage by Alex Tew… the entire background of the site is available as adspace for a measly $64.00 per square… the ads would create a mosaic that the content would overlay – becoming a part of the site’s design.

[_ck_]

Very nice clean design.

Just a suggestion that you’ve got a bit much “above the fold” on that front page. People with regular 1024×768 or 1280×800 viewing areas may never see the bottom part. You may want to try to reduce the vertical height of the login/welcome/search box on top?

[cart3r]

Thanks for the comments. I spent a good amount of time while I was designing this deciding how much I want to have above the fold. This article on Boxes and Arrows was what really did it for me, though: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of

[onecare]

Agree with cK. good work, keep it up.

[cart3r]

The notions about the fold and some other things finally got through me. I just changed things around further; requiring registration to see the content, among other things.

I really like how easy it was with BBpress to make these changes possible – literally less than 20mins. To make things show up only when a user is logged in, I used a bunch of these:

<?php

if ( bb_is_user_logged_in() ) {

include ‘path/to/include.php’;

}

else {

echo ‘ ‘;

}

?>