MGoBlog 3.0: The Preview Comment Count

Seth

So you’ve probably noticed the content has been a little slow this summer. Some of that’s because Hail to the Victors 2017 is taking up my life, but the other huge summer project is rebuilding this site from the ground up.

THE DEVELOPERS

We’ve been working with a local outfit named Human Element. You’ve probably passed by their Kerrytown office at the corner of Detroit and Beakes (and Division and Summit and Carey and High and… you know the junction) a thousand times. Unlike our previous attempts at redeveloping the site they’re established enough to have a team and a schedule they’ve actually managed to stick to.

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We’ve insisted they go by “HUEL” for obvious reasons.

Despite all the curveballs we could come up with from a 10-year-old site on a no longer supported platform, this is happening, and on time. I can’t recommend these guys enough.

THE NEW LOOK

Since we’re deep into the design phase, we saw no reason to keep it to ourselves. So here’s a preview of what we’re sort of going to look like in a couple of months (click each to see a larger size):

Normal front page

Front page when we

have a major feature

Inside an article

MGB Design_Home_v5 MGB Design_Home2_v5 (1) MGB Design_Article_v5 (1)

Let me say a few things about what you’re looking at:

  • No that’s not the header. That’s something one of the HUEL guys whipped up in 30 seconds. We’ve engaged MonuMental to design the new official header. That’s still in the works but his initial thoughts are encouraging:

How about Harbaugh as Conan the Barbarian on a mountain of his enemies' skulls (helmets) with background landscape and Easter eggs inspired by the last few years (Florida palm trees, Rome skyline, stacks of milk bottles) and a snarling oversized Wolverine as his companion?

Open to suggestions about what he is wielding overhead. Maybe a football exploding with light and lightning?

  • It’s going to be a lot wider, since screens have become so.
  • The front page has two modes. Normally there will be some boxes on the top with the latest football article, the latest recruiting article, the latest podcast, and a t-shirt or HTTV something from our store or our top sponsor UGP—these boxes will change based on whatever’s going on at the moment. When we have a featured article (e.g. UFR) it goes to mode 2, with the feature dominating the top and the boxes taking a break.
  • Diaries and the Board are staying put, but your login is moving to the upper-right.
  • The comments will be threaded into boxes, but after a 5 boxes they’ll stop shrinking and just appear underneath. You’ll be able to minimize a box to hide a part of the conversation and focus on the one you’re having.
  • Some users will have little icons next to their names. These will signify things like this person is the OP, or one of our staff, or a moderator, or trusted contributor. Still deciding on how many badges we need—might just be site personnel and hot users (people who recently got a lot of upvotes in that thread).
  • Your MGoPoints should carry over to the new site. Apparently the 3rd party module for that hasn’t been upgraded to Drupal 8 so we may have to create our own, but if it’s possible it will happen.
  • We’ll be moving to a new server that should be able to handle a much greater load, so this place won’t become a disaster during high traffic events.
  • Apps will be brand new and better integrated.

Your feedback is most welcome—we’re building this for you.

Comments

Heptarch

June 12th, 2017 at 7:02 PM ^

Will we be able to access page 2 of board topics and/or search effectively for older threads without needing to sacrifice our firstborn and sing a hymn in Icelandic?

Seriously, though, looks good.  Looking forward to the site upgrade.



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But also kinda serious about not needing Icelandic to access older threads that I might've missed when they fell off the front page.

Bluegriz

June 12th, 2017 at 7:11 PM ^

The mockups are nice but they look like a cookie cutter sports site or pay site. This site looking like all the other sites out there sort of feels like Coach and Four doing a renovation and turning into Great Clips. My feedback would be to improve the infrastructure behind the curtain without changing the brand. Maybe its just me. I haven't been to the new Blimpie Burger yet either. 

RoseInBlue

June 12th, 2017 at 7:24 PM ^

I noticed the links to other michigan sites and other B1G blogs/sites isn't on these mockups.  If possible, I'd like those to stay as they direct me to a lot of content for Michigan and its opponents (you may maintain you're ongoing protest of Maryland/Rutgers by keeping those links off).  

That said, I can find these elsewhere if this complicates matters but I figured I'd provide the feedback.

echoWhiskey

June 13th, 2017 at 12:36 AM ^

1) You should require that the site be fronted by a CDN. It's 2017 and that's just standard practice at this point so you're not hoping one server of gerbil wheels holds up during high traffic events.

2) Can there be a feature to get notifications of replies to your comments. This is a nice discus feature.

Third thing (I lied) is that I would show some mobile centered designs since that's got to be the majority of your traffic. Forget the app if you have a good, full-featured responsive design. It'll be redundant.

Caesar

June 13th, 2017 at 8:37 AM ^

Honestly, I don't mind the current site layout, but I understand that it needs to be updated.

However, MGoBlog has some great articles on football scheme, and I was hoping you guys could compile them into one section. I think that step would make it much easier to learn about football on MGoBlog and potentially elevate the quality of discussion here.

mgobaran

June 13th, 2017 at 11:40 AM ^

Are comments going to auto-refresh? That is my only complaint with the site. Otherwise it looks awesome! 

I love that the four "most recent" articles are small, and don't take up the whole page, hiding the other great articles. I also love that their is space between the articles, and its not all sitting on top of each other like SBNations redesign. That place is a headache to look at now...

Thread Jack

June 13th, 2017 at 2:25 PM ^

I agree with the poster above (but can't find) about facilitating embedding, or at least including instructions in readily available reference section.  The link to ShockFX's post in the FAQs is broken or the posting has gone 404..

JD

June 14th, 2017 at 1:41 PM ^

I've found your site very confusing to navigate (trying to find specific sports or articles.) so I'm really happy that you're working on a cleaner and clearer version.  I enjoy the content, so it will be great to have an easier time finding what's what.