Big codebase update, no more tabs in entries, more stuff - read here!

sothis

sothis

Forum Moderator
Anime-Planet Founder
Developer
Hi everyone,

I've just pushed a pretty big codebase update to the site - there's some fairly major visual changes, along with a bunch of minor ones. Here's a rundown:

  • The tabs are gone in anime and manga entries - now, you'll see all of the relations and staff (without having to scroll in a small window), and the first few of all of the other types of content. There are links to 'see all'. note that I realize this isn't the best layout, especially with all the space on the right/left sides. This was done solely as a prerequisite for the upcoming redesign, we'll fix the layout at that point to be a lot better. The good news is things like the full list of characters for a series are much easier to read now
  • There's new social buttons underneath the main image (facebook, twitter, g+) for anime, manga, people, characters. This is another 'I know the layout isn't the best' moment, but will be changed in the redesign.
  • Relations are now listed in date order, not name order
  • Most of the other entry content is now listed in date order (for example, newest lists/blogs/reviews first)
  • # of comments column now shows up in the entry reviews tables

There's some issues that i'm still working on - if anyone out there has experience with social button/widget integration, would love some help as I'm spinning my wheels with debugging:

  • The g+ button window, for whatever reason, is cut off, won't let you close it and seems weird. Clicking it does seem to share, just it acts strangely. Not sure what's going on with that.
  • Apparently the only way you can add an opengraph tag for FB for books (ie, manga) is if you have an ISBN, which seems crazy to me. There's an open bug/'known issue' on FB's end so for now, sharing manga will be a little odd.
  • In general, sharing on FB is a little bizarre if our images aren't big enough. I'm slowly replacing anime images with 250x250 mains instead of 130x130 so the right image will always show up. I'll open up a thread soon where people can post if they see this happening.
  • Also not sure why the director/'actor' info I've added to anime isn't showing up when liking a series - shows up in the FB debugger, but not on the site. Anyone have experience with this?
  • Twitter links need to probably be set up with bit.ly or a shortener

Good old widgets. Besides that things in theory are good to go. If you notice any other weirdness please let me know - I did thorough testing but it's likely I missed something, and this was a really massive amount of code updated in preparation for making things easier with the redesign.
 
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The new layout is nice but one or two bits i've noticed.

If you go to the full list of characters there are no links to navigate back to where you were which seems to go against basic website navigation as your forced to use the back button or navigate via the main menu or search again. It's the same deal with the other click more links but I use characters and relation tabs the most.

Perhaps you can put in some link trail in underneath the main menu e.g.

On the anime page
Anime >> To Aru Kagaku No Railgun S

All character page
Anime >> To Aru Kagaku No Railgun S >> Characters

Individual characters
Anime >> To Aru Kagaku No Railgun S >> Characters >> Mikoto MISAKA

Edit: nvm noticed the anime title becomes clickable, too early for me XD

Clicking the more screenshots button when your on the characters page, or any of the sub pages doesn't work.

Rec's also seem really far down the page now, I don't use them much but for those that do it is much more scrolling if you don't use the sidebar link.
 
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I really support the decision to do away with tabs and have all the information visible where we can pick and choose which areas to expand.

I agree that the main problem is that recs seem too far down the page. On the Naruto example there is also simply far too much space allocated to 'related anime/manga'. As Dreador highlighted, I would prefer to make it a habit to use the 'recommendations' link in the sidebar but with the new layout I would probably be a lot more likely to instinctively 'scroll' through all the available information for that anime, at which point the recommendations link would get lost. I too could end up navigating away from the recommendations in a decision to maybe expand 'all characters' or 'all reviews' etc. There was an update not too long ago where the table headings were made floating, maybe the rec button could also be made floating?

The social media buttons seem a bit dislocated and 'floating' (poor explanation, sorry)... I always liked the social media box you have used in the reviews, a larger version would look great around the site?

There is a lot of empty space either side of the main content area... scrolling could be minimized if some content was simplified into boxes that could fit into these areas? Especially if the main content area itself was narrowed slightly. (edit: ah, this 'empty space' could be the result of my adblocker?)
 
I wish we could set custom order of thing that were before in tabs (I would like characters first and staff last). Also when manga or anime has no relations added then relations tab should be hidden.
 
this is what i mean by 'i know the layout is bad and there's lots of empty space, but it'll be fixed in the redesign'.

in the redesign, recs will be up a LOT higher, there won't be empty space, etc. it's just not a problem easily/moderately easily to fix right now, so we're focusing all of our energy on the redesign. this was a necessary step towards the redesign basically.

same with the social buttons - the whole 'i know they dont look good' thing

tl;dr, i do realize none of it looks great, it's on purpose/the only option right now, its why i said it a few times in the first post :)
 
going to bold/red those lines in the first post atm so they're easier to see
 
Bamboocha said:
I wish we could set custom order of thing that were before in tabs (I would like characters first and staff last). Also when manga or anime has no relations added then relations tab should be hidden.
Click to expand...

relations tab shouldnt show up if theres no relations so that sounds like a bug, ill investigate
 
It's odd that the relations and staff "tabs" just grow to any size and never have a "see all" link, while all the other "tabs" max out at a given size & use a "see all" link to view the rest. (As coffeebreath pointed out, the naruto anime in particular has an insanely huge relations "tab".)

While I realize that the reason for the situation seems to be that the relations & staff info don't have their own seperate pages to link to, you could achieve "close enough" results by doing something similar to the spoiler tag here in the forums, using css & javascript to affect a similar result. Have the relations DIV default to say "max-height:400px;", then include a "see all" link which would actually be a javascript link which would change that CSS to "max-height:100%;".
 
naruto is an edge case, it's rare there's so many relations, and given people always thought 'there's no relations' (and given there's usually no more than 4 staff for 98% of all entries), thats why they will be listed in full. i dont want people thinking we're missing relations because they don't see the 'see all' link, which is much more important than not realizing we dont have more than 5 custom lists or 5 characters.

also, again, this page is going to look totally different once the redesign happens
 
sothis said:
relations tab shouldnt show up if theres no relations so that sounds like a bug, ill investigate
Click to expand...

Yeah, at presnt all tabs show at all times, regardless whether or not there's any content for said tab. The relations tab is only about 20~30 pixels high when there are no relations, but it is there.
 
Checked in these fixes:

1. Staff tab doesn't show up anymore if there's no staff (this is extremely rare but yeah)
2. Relations tab correctly doesn't display now if there's none

the other ones are meant to show up if theres none, these two were mistakes :)
 
So, instead of tabs and minor bit of scrolling, you slap everything up front, which just requires more scrolling anyway? I hope I'm not the only one who finds this utterly redundant.
 
as i've mentioned several times now, this is not the best layout, and it needs to happen in preparation for the redesign, which will fix the issues. i never said 'this is being done to fix scrolling' as you are seeming to insinuate.

i find it utterly redundant too. and it's still necessary for the future redesign.
 
Sothis, I am so excited about the redesign! xD

Keep up all the hard work, looks promising. I think your bullet points all make sense, there's nothing that is off-putting to me. Things don't need to be pretty right now, it just needs to work until the redesign arrives.

I would suggest you try something out for the social media buttons. Not changing any functionality, just experiment with having them in their own div/box area (and have the box title be "share" or something like that). Maybe have it right above the stats box, just an aesthetic thought.

There is a lot more relations than recommendations (I'm guessing relations is also automatically generated). I definitely think the rec should be up higher in the redesign, to give it more emphasis (I know this has already been touched, just saying what's on my mind).

If scrolling is a particular worry, we could just section off the content via dynamic tabs on each page (there are many ways to skin a cat, but it doesn't really bother me).
 
i'd like to put all of the efforts into the redesign instead of updating what's currently there, as it's 100% changing
 
Glad I read this, it makes sense now. Thought you were going to keep it this way. Can't wait to see redesign.
 
oh i 100% expect that when the big redesign goes up, there will be a lot of angst (because things won't always be in a familiar location, etc). this time it's being professionally done so i'm quite positive it will be a massive improvement, but still, change is hard, i def understand that :)

it's part of why i'm planning on rolling out small batches of changes before the redesign - to get people used to changes slowly. expect more of those in the future :)
 
Social media buttons! HUZZAH!
I can't wait to see the new layout when it goes live. Is there a rough estimated date?
 
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