New Theme!: Drag n Drop Layout, Three columns, Flexible

Check it out!

Working title is “ment-blox” and you can see it in action on my page: http://www.m3nt0r.de/blog/ (named v4 in theme switcher, but is activated by default). Play around and give feedback please. Site is in german tho, but as for demonstration purpose that shouldn’t matter 🙂

ABOUT:
Okay.. This is it! This definitly blows me away. I was so excited once i got it working.. seriously.. i was going “uuu weeee” on front of my PC. Awesome.

Kassad came up with the idea to add the netvibes functionality of a fully dragable layout. It was kinda hard for me to make it possible and started to play around with the DBX script which was also used in the CrimsonMilk Theme by Jalenack. But it was too limited. You couldn’t give any custom dropzone which was what i need to declare one of the three columns in this theme as possible targets.

The whole site are just 3 big unordered lists, floating, no fixed widths, with then again the usual WP lists.

In version 3 i had this small dynamic box attached to every post with useful links. I didn’t know where to put all this information so i thought it’s nice to have in one quicklink-box and to call it “options”. You can call that box, coming up with a nice slide effect, by clicking the options image at bottom of every post.

You can colapse/expand everything on this site.

Why?: For example. While being on “home” you could look for the posts you are interested in, just expand those and sort them before reading. I think that’s a nice feature.

As for “home” i wrote a small script. On load usually all items are collapsed, but i made it so that the first 2 articles are visible. I was checking some boxes on the left and right but i couldn’t find anything of value to be shown every time the page loads. (who needs categories all the time.. etc..), so for the rest it will stay like that atm.

Overall this site is using nearly all latest technologies while still being XHTML valid which makes me absolutly proud. (tis ma baby ^^) It’s so lovely and also so expandable. I thought some more while finishing the current state:

– How about fetching the content on box-expand via ajax.
like: you click on the small arrow, the loading bar fades in and the content slides down once its all there.
– How about you could generate more dragable boxes by doing a search or “browse” without having the page refreshed. That way you would have access to the whole content on one page!! “lets take this, and this, put it here, okay – thats also nice, search some more, drag, drop.. etc..” and then SAVE*!

But before i let you finish reading, i have to admit some downsides (of course it’s not final):
– *major: the layout doesn’t get saved YET! (any ideas somebody?)
– the highlight after dragging isn’t perfect (but its okay for average visitors)
– if you abuse the functions by clicking rapidly the script starts hanging (who’s so nasty, huh? 😉

Erm.. well.. That’s it for now (as if it wouldnt be much, heh). I will dig myself into the AJAX functions tonite and give you guys a shout later again. I hope you guys like it and i’m planning to make it public as soon as i’m done. And because of that i wanna collect some suggestions. Go ahead.. my motto is “nothing is impossible.”

– m3nt0r

copy of this thread, english, for comments: http://www.m3nt0r.de/blog/?page_id=211