Too Much Coffee

Just as an f y i, I'm going to put up a test version of this site on my personal hosting account so that I can play with all of the various enhancements and fixes that I need to be getting on with.

When this site was first created there were very few of us and it was easy to just fiddle around until I got something in a usable shape. However now we are a round dozen, and most of the time when I visit the site there's more than just me there.

My primary concerns are :

• Improving the menus on the home page (and the general look and feel) so that people can find things more easily
• Improving the user profile management and registration process so that we can revert to having people register themselves, albeit they won't be accepted as members unless the group agrees, as recently discussed
• Generally tidying up the document hierarchies which make up the coffee reviews (hey, we've got 5 of these now - when are you going to do one?)

Any input in terms of how you'd like it to look (within the limits of what I can achieve with the available software without further development) or what your issues are with the existing set up, will be well received.

For the "founder members" (which theoretically includes Nass although I don't think we'll be seeing him for a long time, if ever - he's working offshore as I understand it) - what do you want me to do with the blog which was the predecessor of this site? And for that matter, is there any interest amongst the newer members in retaining this historical record? I don't think it would be particularly easy to migrate it into the forum, so I can either

• Put a Postnuke wrapper around it and make it available from the site
• Just put a link on the site to point to it
• Archive it just in case we want a laugh some time in the future
• Just kill it off altogether

Any of the options which involve retaining the blog will mean me moving it from jordanfamily.me.uk to toomuchcoffee.com, as I only have 100MB of space on my personal account but 1GB of space on toomuchcoffee.com.


Please feed back on the above and anything else you'd like to mention about the site.

Phil

I don't think it's particularly useful to migrate the old blog to toomuchcoffee. It wasn't intended to be shared, so maybe you should put it to rest, i e just delete it.

On the other points: I agree very much with what you intend to do. My suggestion (I'm sure you thought of this yourself) is to integrate the two different menus top and left. Maybe it's a good idea to have submenus left and to keep the top menu always the same or vice versa.

Other things I've wondered about (if at all technically possible, of course):
1. An "unread posts" feature; sometimes I don't have time to read all the posts in one visit, and afterwards they seem to get lost. Ideally this function would have a "mark all read" option too, e.g. if you fell too far behind after a holiday.
2. If I use the little arrow-with-page function, the browser doesn't jump immediately to the latest post, but the first. It would be handy to be able to jump right to the comment.
3. The "posts by this user" function doesn't seem to work.

Standard disclaimer: these are only things that I think would improve the site, please feel free not to do anything about them if you don't have time or don't feel like it.

I would volunteer to copy and paste the old blog into this forum, but since not all of the founder members are proud of their rants, let's kill it forever!

Btw, I don't think Nass is a founding member, Phil! (Sorry I feel very strongly about that as you know )

It's not that I'm proud or ashamed, I just forgot what I said
(BTW you're so active today : day off?)

I am not off, but it is extremely quiet in the office today, and I do not care what the bosses think of it today. Finally had a chance to catch up with all the posts. Still need to read the cupping reviews, and articles. And ideally write my own articles!

And ideally write my own articles!

Yes! Very important!