Display Much Information in a Small Space
Posted by Matt | Filed under UI Design, Wordpress
So I’ve got this popular Volvo web site with about 11,000 registered users. Super. The heart of it is the Volvo Forum, a roiling, boiling mass of Volvo owners trading information, advice and tears at the rate of 75-100 posts per day. The problem is that from the Home page, it doesn’t look so roiling-boiling. Fix: show the activity on the Home page. Get it out in front of people.
Ok, not a hard task. The phpBB forum (outstanding, free software by the way) is on interior pages, and is run entirely by the site’s database. All I needed to do was query a table in the database for the ten or 15 or whatever number of latest posts and voila, the roiling-boiling is then shown to the browsing hoi polloi.
But a) I wanted it up near the top to lure users deeper into my site and b) I didn’t want it to take up much space.
Ingredient #1
After scouting around for some possibilities I found Latest Posts, a script that pulls latest posts from a phpBB forum and displays them in a scrolling marquis.
Not bad. So I used it at the bottom of the Home page. Read the rest of this entry » »»»»» »
Tags: Cycle plugin, JQuery, phpBB3, phpBB3 latest posts, relative dates, UI, Wordpress