Mobile Site Design

Some CMS (forums, word press, Nova, and various others) are better at mobile friendly site design than others. My game uses Nova because I like it overall, and because it seems to be the defacto standard for Star Trek sims, but it is absolutely hopeless for mobile friendliness. At one time, I had been determined to fix this, then the developer announced that he was going to completely overhaul the skinning system with the next major release and that it was going to include proper mobile friendly design... so I decided to wait. Now it's starting to feel like the next major release is like Duke Nukem Forever, and I am tired of waiting. The system for skinning on the current version of nova is pretty convoluted though, so I intend to strip back one of the default skins to bare essentials, and rebuild it to hopefully be less adversarial to mobile browsers and better organized on the back end.

My biggest challenge is figuring out what resources to use while trying to figure out what to do and not do. I could spend a bunch of time poking through various results on Duck Duck Go, reading articles, and experimenting until I make it not horrible, or I could see if any of you lovely people would like to share your experiences and favored resources with me to hopefully make this a little less painful.

I've already grabbed a css reset and customized it a little, and I'm pulling the four different sections worth of css files and images into one universal directory, as currently nova splits skins into four sections: main, wiki, admin, and login. Splitting it up this way also means that usually there are four copies of the same files uploaded for each section which seems like such a waste. I'm also strongly considering killing most, if not all, of the jquery stuff since most of it doesn't seem to work well on the mobile browsers.

I already intended to share the results with the anodyne xtras site if I have any success, and I'll be happy to share my results here too if anyone's interested. Even if not, I would hope that sharing information about mobile friendly site design will be useful to everyone. These days most people access the web from their phones or tablets, less and less people actually sit down at any sort of computer, so your chances of having active and engaged members in your game seems to be partially linked to how mobile friendly your site design is.

 

When I first started working on skinning Nova, I realized how convoluted that the skinning system was. I hated it so much, I actually got the content down to 1 css sheet, 1 header file to edit, and 1 footer file. Everything pretty much used most of the same resources. Hit me up and I'll send you some of the code I was working on. That being said, this skin: http://xtras.anodyne-productions.com/item/emily/tranquility may help you with getting it more mobile friendly, as they claim to have optimizations for smaller screens already. :)

 

The Nova skinning system is the most frustrating thing I've ever encountered. I get that it is that way because the developer thought people would want different styles on different sections of the site... But that doesn't make it any less further from the reality of the situation.

Part of the clean up I'm working on is condensing style sheets and graphics, though I think I will still have multiple sheets just based on what I've already learned about mobile design and reactive style. Probably one sheet for the over all style, then sheets for different display sizes, perhaps leave the jqueary stuff isolated so it's not triggered for mobile.

I will poke through the style you linked, and I would appreciate being able to see what you've done too. What's the best way for you to share what you have?

 

I learned to RP on PBeM games so for me the concept of Nova is just fabulous. I even tried to play around with setting a game up on it but had such a frustrating time I gave up. It's geared very much towards Star Trek sims and there doesn't seem to be much room for anything else even though the system is great. Not to mention the absolute horrific time I had with the skin. I'm afraid there's not much help I can offer other than wishing you the very best of luck. I've been waiting for the next update which promised soooo much more for what feels like forever. I always keep an eye on Nova but for the time being steer well clear of it. Good luck! I would be very interested in following your progress.

 

At the risk of derailing my thread here, which isn't getting much attention anyways, what style game were you trying to set up and what wasn't working? I had a decent set up for a steam punk game for a while, it's doom was entirely based upon the person I made the mistake of starting it with.

 

No, don't derail it. We shall call it a minor offshoot so that people can jump back in on topic. I tried to go with two ideas at different points (the first on the prior Nova version and the latter on the current one). The first was a political steam punk game before the genre was everywhere. The second was a supernatural adventure type of thing not wholly disimilar to II. I just couldn't quite get either of rhem to fit comfortably within Nova's framework.

 

Because I dislike the built-in wiki system, and the ship I was designing this for used Mediawiki instead, I didn't do a lot of work with the Wiki section, so this layout may have strange results there, but you're free to look it over. Perhaps we can set up some sort of hosting (probably free) we both have access to so we can collaborate on our work and see the results in real time. Though, here is what I have, let me know if you are unable to download it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6FcPFAZ2io1Zy03X2JnVHhfSFE/view?usp=sharing

 

Okay, file downloaded... but my brain's winding down for the night. I'll poke at it tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to the wiki section's skinning, as it seems like it'll be the most convoluted of them all. There are just so many tiny things to fuss over... and of course because I'm lazy, I'm just using it instead of trying to make a mediawiki's urls not suck while still being on the same sub domain as the nova. >.<

I have a test nova that I'm loading all my stuff into right now for a steampunk game that was abandoned a while back, but its ftp login is the same as the ftp for the rest of my stuff on my domains, I'd have to move it around to give anyone else access. Or I can just set up another one, the nice thing about dreamhost shared hosting, technically unlimited everything, as long as my needs don't hose the people I'm sharing resources with.

 

I'm the creator of that Nova skin that was posted here earlier. Since then, I've developed a skin called Neptune (http://xtras.anodyne-productions.com/item/emily/neptune) which should work a little bit better with your mobile devices. The skin linked earlier is mobile optimized, but the navigation elements are still a bit clunky. The skin I use for my current skin is fully mobile friendly skin that utilizes JS (you can see my coding skills develop when comparing Tranquility to the skin I have now lol).

As for the new version of Nova, it's still in development and we don't have a release date scheduled, nor can we really estimate when exactly it will be ready for beta testing. We're currently in PR3/10 (plus another release for the beta). I wouldn't wait to develop a skin for your site, though. (Coming from Anodyne Productions' Community Engagement Specialist)