Website & Forum Layout issues - with screenshot

Hi - I'm having a few usability issues with the website layout. Nothing showstopping but this is what betas are for, right?

First, my stats: I'm using XP at 1280 x 1024. Display fonts are set to normal size. I'm looking at the site in Firefox 1.5. Minimum browser fonts are set to 16.

• I've attached a screenshot but I'm not sure if it's going to show up. Image tags are not listed in the allowed HTML and the directions only read "Images can be added to this post." It would be helpful if we were told how.

• Spacing of the advance search box on the gray column left is wonky.

• The drop down box with the text in the top menu should be styled to match the advance search text box. Especially the Go button.

• This screenshot was taken while I was posting in the forums. Here's the thread I was looking at: Linkage

  Note the run over of the Poster's name into the next column.

• Navigation in the forums breaks down once you're reading a thread. There's no crumb trail or link that will take back to the forum list. Your only option at that point is either your back button or the main forum link. Currently, there's only one thread in this forum so you don't even get next thread title in the original post.

• In forums with more than one thread, the original post has links to the next and previous post. The problem here is that it breaks with the standard message board navigation. If you want to include it, fine, but people coming new to the board will expect the forum to work like ezboard or vbulletin or phpbb. The standard back/forward links should be available - people will reach for them.

  And again, there should be a navigational link to the forum list, whether it's crumbs or a jump box or whatever.

Congrats on getting Manifesto to beta and here's to your future success!

My...that is ugly. And odd, since we test in Firefox mainly (most of the issues we've had are with IE). But we'll look into it.

And yes, forum functionality is something that didn'tget a lot of attention during development, because, well, we had nobody to use them. And it is an area we want to clean up in the days to come.

Thanks!

"Standard" forum navigation conventions will definately go a long way!

costik, do you guys have any ajax-y plans for future versions of the site?

Hmm... Well--not sure we have much in the way of internal code we could open up to an Ajax-y development environnment. But what do you have in mind?

Well, it's all going to go towards Ajax or Ajax-like setups eventually (as Google is showing us). I was mostly just curious - as a general rule I'd love to work and play in a post-back-less web environment, but the former isn't an option just yet (though I was told last week we might be looking into doing some Ajax stuff at work next year), and the latter is coming along, albeit slowly.

Well, as far as pretty AJAX and javascript go, Drupal is planing on joining forces with a very slick javascript libarary called JQuery. Check it out at jquery.com if you like. This should open up a lot of avenues for us in the future.

That said we've got a lot of things to work on so I'm going to go out on a limb and say we wont be devoting a lot of time to AJAX flare in the near future and any we do get will be trickled down from the smart minds at Drupal.