Web Site Design

[b]Excellent![/b]

Let's flesh out some ideas and come up with some plans, then we (or I :lol:) can work out some designs, etc.

Here are the main sections as I see them now.

home page
community forum
about the group
calendar
member profiles
articles(news, howtos, articles)

I did copy the site over to my server and changed the height of that element to 100px from 100% and it worked fine in IE.

Another fix:
In IE it looks like you will have to have the element inside another element. The inner element will then stretch to 100% of the height of the outer element.

The site may have to be laid out a little differently to take advantage of the second approach

[quote="boice"]Here are the main sections as I see them now.

home page
community forum
about the group
calendar
member profiles
articles(news, howtos, articles)[/quote]

Ok, so what do others think?

I'd like to add a resources page, containing information and links to resources that local PHP users might find helpful. To start, the page could show the PHP jobs from craigslist that the site now shows, plus a few links to PHP resources like php.net, pear.php.net, sitepoint.com, phppatterns.com, etc.

Unless we have volunteers to work on them, we'll probably need to hold off on the calendar, member profile, and articles sections for now until we have the content for them. However the site layout should be flexible enough to expand to include those sections, of course. For now, news and calendar events could be put on the home page.

home page
community forum
about the group
resources

That sounds great. I am sure we can put together a nice list of resources. Keeping it simple and expandable is the way to go.

One thing I noticed about the seattle user's group was that they had regular monthly meetings. I think this brings the group to life. I think that people coming to the group want to see some life. Regular meetings tells people that these are real people that are really involved. Not just a site that may or may not represent an active group.

I have a few calendar applications built and ready to plugin.

I personally vote for a calendar on the first round.

Regarding the calendar, I say 'go for it'. There's no sense in holding back a site feature if somebody's volunteering to do it.

Here is an idea: Case Studies

If some of you pro's can post maybe one of your projects and describe how it works. Would be a great resource for newbies.

Okay everyone.

As discussed at out first meeting, I have set-up five design choices for the pending PDX PHP website.

You can access them via http://caliber-consulting.com/pdxphp/

Let me know your thought and/or questions.

Cheers!
Richard

PS -- boy, it's sure been quite here lately. :?

First off, I want to say that these look very professional. Richard, when you asked at our first meeting whether we preferred a photoshop-cut-up style or a css-heavy style, I didn't really have a strong opinion ether way, but now that I see what you had in mind for the photoshop-cut-up style, I say let's see your css-heavy style. Sites that come to mind are php.net, sitepoint.com, seaphp.org. Either that or try vastly simplifying these designs. The prototypes all have quite a corporate flavor to them, even after removing the flash banners, intro music, photographs of computer equipment and business people. They all say to me, "This is a sophisticated rock-solid company with lots of money".

i just joined, had seen this site a while ago before it opened and wanted to then. im 16, and an expert php programmer among many other languages. the layouts for the site though, in the post above i wasnt able to go to that url. although im pretty good in design also, i think ill try making a layout to spruce up this site. :)
o, and also, hand coded css design :)

[img]http://magmastudios.elixant.com/freelance/Pdx-Php.gif[/img]

The layout looks good. Nice and simple.

A designer friend of mine put together a few logo bugs that we could use.

Could everyone take a look at these and judge whether they are appropriate and if you have a preference.

[img]http://www.gillensarmy.com/pdxphp/pdxphp.jpg[/img]

If we choose one of thesem maybe we could adjust the color palette of the design to match...

Here is a sample

[img]http://www.gillensarmy.com/pdxphp/pdx_php_round_2.jpg[/img]

First off, codyrockx - welcome to the group.
I like all the designs put forth so far (much better than I could ever do, I'm more of a back-end coder than front-end). codyrockx's site is well laid out and has a clean contemporary design. But just coming from my personal preference, boices site is a bit more appealing to me. I have always been a fan of keeping sites as 'white' as possible and only using color to accent and draw attention and the site boice put forward seems to pull that off pretty well. That's just my (artistically uneducated) opinion though. I could definitely see codyrockx's talents contributing to the final design.
I think the important think is getting a simple, professional, functional site up and running so we can then promote pdxphp through the community as a 'legitimate' usergroup. So let me know if I can be of any help to anyone to get us towards that goal.

As for logo's I tent to actually like the green dots (used in the screen shot). They are totally abstract and subtle 'green dot' accents could be used throughout the site to bring the whole thing together.

my 2 cents...

Hi, sorry I didn't reply to this sooner. These samples weren't there the first time I checked.

I like all of them. They look REALLY good!

Let's see... I have a preference for the page design and logos from boice & co. However, the one from codyrockx is good too.

Out of the multiple logo choices, I like the green dots one too. However, I have a question: Is everybody dead-set on naming the group PDX PHP? The green dot logo kind of depends on it. Would PHP PDX be more appropriate? What are everybody's thoughts? I like the blue swoosh and the single green dot too.

By the way, the web site changed servers a couple weeks ago. Hope not too many people noticed.

I prefer pdxphp over phppdx. Regardless the owner of phppdx may be willing to forward to pdxphp or at least be an auxillary site.

The greent dots have four votes now.

We may be ready for development. How does everyone feel about that.

yea, i like the green dot logo also. hehe, i just found this, but we could have like a phillipenese mascot that gives out phillipinese pesos (php) hehe

I'm somewhat of a newbie and would love to know of opportunities for accredited training in the Portland area or online. Perhaps the resource section could also be devoted to training as well. Just a thought. Wish I could have been at the meeting last night...

[quote]I'm somewhat of a newbie and would love to know of opportunities for accredited training in the Portland area or online[/quote]
PCC has one course on PHP I know of.
You also might check www.zend.com since they have started PHP certification and have mentioned they will have online training.
Also, whenever you can, come to the meetings since we set aside time for free discussion and problem solving and feel free to post problems or issues with PHP to forums on this site.
[quote]Perhaps the resource section could also be devoted to training as well[/quote]
This subject did come up at the meeting. We plan to install a Wiki on pdxphp.org which could be used for collaborative documentation and/or tutorials.

Hope you can make the next meeting (should be in about a month, check back for more details)

One minor request in respect to the design of the site...is there any chance the CSS could be changed such that links are underlined? I have trouble picking them out (especially on the home page) because they look just like regular text. Can you tell I spend a lot of time discussing usage and accessibility at work?

Thank you!

I'm moving pdxphp.org (and all the other sites on d249v19.monstervintage.com) to a new server with a new provider, ServerBeach.com. I recommend ServerBeach.com for low-cost dedicated server hosting, and if anybody wants to rent a server from them, let me know first (moxley ?AT? moxleydata d0T com) so I can get a kickback for being your referrer ;)

Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that I've configured this new server with all the good stuff:

PHP 5.01
Fedora C1
MySQL 4.1
Apache 2.0.50
Qmail

:) My dream setup :)

Hopefull nothing will break due to the PHP upgrade to version 5.