Site Course Layout Changes

I noticed the layout is different. I'm just wondering if this is permanent or something that's being worked on. The list of lessons for a course is anchored to the video player and doesn't extend down the page. I personally preferred the way it was before when it was anchored to the right side and extended down the page. It's not a huge issue as I can just zoom in on the page but I thought I would give my feedback. 

  • Pavel Mazanik(nekronavt) replied

    Have some feedback too.

    I find scrollbars inside a page absolutely barbaric :D

    I think that sticky sidebar is a far better option. And I find layout a bit strange.  Main content is not wrapped in a single container and had padding on right, while sidebar is positioned as absolute. That's looking absolutely senseless to me since there is such things as "flexbox" and "css grid" :)

  • Trevor Simpson(biohazard2015) replied

    For my two pence worth, I'd agree with that.  

    And I'd add I find the confirmation or otherwise of a quiz answer now flashes up a tick rather goes green (or red). Given how quickly it then jumps to the next question it is easy to miss. Please go back to the colour change on the answer.

  • smurfmier1985 replied

    What I would really like is a button at the top of a forum thread to "Jump To Last Page", instead of having to scroll all the way down first and select the last page there. That would be awesome :)

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Hey Robert, thanks for the feedback! It's always a work in progress, but we did need to get rid of the fixed sidebar for good. It was killing our usability on mobile, and now our site is finally mobile friendly without it. 

    I can't speak to the nitty gritty of css grids and such just yet, but I'm sure @nphaskins has good reason for the way it's built. 

    And I'd add I find the confirmation or otherwise of a quiz answer now flashes up a tick rather goes green (or red). Given how quickly it then jumps to the next question it is easy to miss. Please go back to the colour change on the answer.

    Noted!

    What I would really like is a button at the top of a forum thread to "Jump To Last Page", instead of having to scroll all the way down first and select the last page there. That would be awesome :)

    At the moment it should remember the last post you read and jump to that, which should get you to the right place faster than jumping to the last page. If it's not doing so then we'll need to investigate. Thanks for the heads up! 


  • Jacob Watson(keyhenge) replied

    If there's anything I really want, it's a button to have the video take the full width of the page. I work on one monitor, so to follow along I'm usually dedicating half of my screen to CGCookie. A large portion of that is taken by the sidebar now, and since a lot of the videos I'm watching have the blender UI included, the stuff I'm interested in at any one time is tiny.

  • Wilco Wilbrink(carrotnl) replied

    At the moment it should remember the last post you read and jump to that, which should get you to the right place faster than jumping to the last page. If it's not doing so then we'll need to investigate. Thanks for the heads up!

    @jlampel  It's jumping to the last reading position when I'm entering a topic. A lot of times I'm reading back older posts, so it would be nice if there was a button to go to the last post in the topic. Especially with large topics such as the classes.

    And something else: I would really appreciate  buttons on the video's to jump to the next video when I'm full screen. At the moment I have to jump out of full screen at the end of every video to go to the next video and then make them full screen again.

    Also it would be nice if we could just tick of the check mark in the list of videos to the right to mark a video watched. I find myself constantly clicking those check marks, trying to unmark of a series of videos.
    I watch a series of videos, then I unmark them, and watch them again, this time following along in Blender.

    Hope this isn't to much complaining.  You've done a great job already. But these points are what hinder me the most. 

  • Wilco Wilbrink(carrotnl) replied


    kkeyhenge That button is actually there. Look at the blue button on the right top of the video. :)

  • Aaron Rudderham(thecabbagedetective) replied

    This is going to be quite possibly the most petty thing I've ever complained about but I preferred the old XP earned bar where it was a smooth slope as opposed to the jagged edges. If you don't wanna change this I totally understand because it changes absolutely nothing and just me being nitpicky haha.

  • smurfmier1985 replied


    thecabbagedetective lol, you're just a perfectionist ;-)

  • smurfmier1985 replied

    @jlampel Hi Jonathan, I tested it for a couple of days and it does jump to the last page you read. However, I still had some issues with that... 

    I noticed that after adding a reply to a thread, the website automatically jumps to page one. So in that case you still have to scroll all the way down. Guess you could fix that by letting the website remember on which page you added the reply, but a simple button to "Jump To Last Page" would very easily fix that too.

    Also, like ccarrotnl I read back a lot! Especially in the class thread. Which of course means that the next time I open the thread I'm finding myself on the wrong page... 

    So I still believe the button would be very valuable, but it's up to you guys of course 😁

  • Pavel Mazanik(nekronavt) replied

    @nphaskins I have a little more of feedback. This is not new and it's bothering me since I'm here. I click bell one time - I got dropdown with notifications. When I click it second time I expect it to close dropdown, but instead it's throwing me to notifications page. Don't know if I'm alone with this, but I think the link "See all" in dropdown is enough in my opinion. I find current behavior pretty anoying, when I'm watching course and I throws me out of course page.

    PS. I'm webdev myself and know how annoying users can be with their "great ideas", so thank you for your patience :D

  • Wilco Wilbrink(carrotnl) replied


    nekronavt  @nphaskins  I found myself on the notification page a couple of times to.

    Another thing (keep em coming :) ): I would like the notifications to be visible when I scroll down a page. When I'm on the forum, I constantly have to scroll to the top to see if there were new notifications, and then scroll down again to find where I was reading last.

  • smurfmier1985 replied

    @nphaskins Also there's the mystery bug of sometimes getting huge avatar pictures, as seen in the example  of your avatar above 😉