Site revamp - potential new way to organize drawings

[Colosseum]

Hi all -

I did some fooling around in Photoshop and came up with a mockup of what we could potentially build into the site with the right people working on it.



Let me know what you think. Need guidance on how best to handle (programmatically) the Russian/Soviet stuff since I know it doesn't follow the Western conventions.

Here's that page as it currently exists: http://shipbucket.com/images.php?dir=Re ... 942-06.png

Regards
Ian

[Rodondo]

Personally I like your new format a lot, far more informative! thumbs up from me

[acelanceloet]

it looks good, very good even, but a few things come to mind.
- these right people, any chance on getting them or is this just an hypothetical image?
- the prefix 'USS' etc is not an fixed something (government changes or head of state change have influences on that) for example, all dutch ships were HrMs but all commisioned now have ZrMs because we got a king. in addition, you would also have to add a table of ship types which got these names (as civilian vessels do not get these prefixes or different ones) for that reason it might be good to either just include this in the name or ignore it completely.
- maybe not at first, but it would be nice to be able to search on weapons/sensors and sort on that. for example, all terrier GMLS ships or all ships Mk 13 launchers.
- splitting the sensors in 'fire control' 'navigation' 'air search' and 'Sonar' would be nice.
- in my opinion sorting on engine type would be nice too, but other then that I agree and more information would not really be needed.
- a small bit of text showing the state of the drawing ('as during the battle of doggersbank', for example)
- I personally think a pre-existing list of classes would be an bad idea, as there are just too many single ships not really listed well in classes, and there will be new build quite often. if the author of the drawing can add classes to the list, this is something different of course

anyways, even with these questions, thumbs up from me too!

[Thiel]

It's the first of April...

[Gollevainen]

Yes that looks really good set up. Do you have idea of how each of the pages under the tabs would look like?

[JSB]

Personally I would like it if you could search and alter the groups order or miss one out entirely,
so you could search by Real Design (Category), Battleship(Types), Date so you would get all nations ships of the right types from a specific era.

That or just adding dates to ships would be amassing....

[citizen lambda]

So we're edging one step closer to building the Harpoon database in SB?
Kidding aside, I like the idea of organizing the drawings in a more modular, database-like fashion where you could (potentially) filter or sort the drawings per country, type, reality level...
The current organization is intuitive as long as you stick to sorting by reality level first, then by country, then by class.

On the other hand, hearing the current complaints about the file names, I'm wondering how the meta-data you suggest will look like in function, and what endless debates wil corp up about their format and content.

[Krakatoa]

The whole idea revolves around two things:

1. That the current crop of artists are willing to do the work to make such a system work.

2. That this is not more than an April Fools. (what was last year - sacking all the management?)

[Colosseum]

No it isn't an April Fools... it was posted on 3/31 anyway.

- these right people, any chance on getting them or is this just an hypothetical image?

We'll see... I posted this as a hypothetical system just to get people talking about it. I want a better idea of how it should work before I go try to get people to help me build it.

- the prefix 'USS' etc is not an fixed something (government changes or head of state change have influences on that) for example, all dutch ships were HrMs but all commisioned now have ZrMs because we got a king. in addition, you would also have to add a table of ship types which got these names (as civilian vessels do not get these prefixes or different ones) for that reason it might be good to either just include this in the name or ignore it completely.

This of course can be configurable, with many different prefixes available. This would allow the system to nicely italicize the name of the ship (as is standard in most publications).

- maybe not at first, but it would be nice to be able to search on weapons/sensors and sort on that. for example, all terrier GMLS ships or all ships Mk 13 launchers.

This should be possible provided the parts system is also created.

- splitting the sensors in 'fire control' 'navigation' 'air search' and 'Sonar' would be nice.

This will be one of the attributes available to electronics/sensors in any parts system that gets created.

- in my opinion sorting on engine type would be nice too, but other then that I agree and more information would not really be needed.

If this sounds like a useful sorting feature to you then I think we could definitely add "Engine type" as an optional field. I imagine it would be a pre-populated list that would be selected using a dropdown box when submitting the drawing. Does that make sense?

- a small bit of text showing the state of the drawing ('as during the battle of doggersbank', for example)

A "Comments" field would be easy and quick to add and should be no hassle whatsoever.

- I personally think a pre-existing list of classes would be an bad idea, as there are just too many single ships not really listed well in classes, and there will be new build quite often. if the author of the drawing can add classes to the list, this is something different of course

I haven't quite decided how the "Class" list would be populated but I assume it would be filled in by the submitters/approvers as drawings are added. Also, I was envisioning a system where "Class" might be optional (for one-offs etc) and then the drawing would just roll up to "Type" instead.

Yes that looks really good set up. Do you have idea of how each of the pages under the tabs would look like?

If I can sneak some time at work today I was going to make mockups for the other views - those would be included.

so you could search by Real Design (Category), Battleship(Types), Date so you would get all nations ships of the right types from a specific era.

With the power of a database-driven approach this would be easy and definitely something I planned on adding. For instance, maybe I want to see all USA real designs destroyers between a certain date range, etc.

On the other hand, hearing the current complaints about the file names, I'm wondering how the meta-data you suggest will look like in function, and what endless debates wil corp up about their format and content.

I can only design and build it, the arguments will be up to you guys to resolve.

[heuhen]

the idea is good.

What could be done is make an upload page. Where the artist that are uploading a drawing, have to write in all information in different boxes, and add in different information, and add a direct link to the drawing.

The drawing will not come up automatically, but will be "hold" until admin have had a look at it and accepted all information and the link. from there and in it's all automatically.

It will probably help with making it easier to "search" trough the archive.


Just a simple idea, it would of course look totally different, With multiple drop-down windows, and tons of information that can be added. Here we users do all the work, admin or "Quality controller" control that we have done information correct and can ask us if there is anything, the drawing will load up to the archive first, when it have been accepted by the admin or "Quality controller"