By the brown bananas of Betelgeuse! It can only be
Sponge Docs Pop Quiz #25
Reappearing again at random, the quiz is here to surprise the unwary with an open invitation to give random feedback. Here are some more ideas to chew on and regurgitate at your leisure.
Eliza the Psych Bot asks, "How do you feel about the New SpongePowered Homepage?"
Serious effort has gone into the development and refinement of the new homepage, thanks to a new web-dev team led by @Owexz and @Tzk. See what you think!
There is a plan afoot to add Schematics to SpongeAPI… Would you use them?
Methods for storing builds for cut-and-paste operations has always been beyond the scope of vanilla Minecraft. Having a new schematic format in the API should assist many plugins, will yours be one?
This latest in a long queue of random interrogatories now draws to an end. Whilst waiting for the future to arrive, feel free to re-examine the past. Until next time, remember backwards backwards is forwards.
Sure - anything that makes it easier for developers to catch errors early and users to report errors easily is a gain for everyone!
I do like the overall design direction but I think it still needs some refinement (sorry for the large text wall coming!).
It feels like nothing is catching my eye and that as I scroll down, it’s really busy - and the capitals feel a tad overdone.
There is no obvious download button (that server owners will look for) - the “Get Sponge” area seems small and devoid of information. In particular, putting “Sponge API” in the middle of the two server implementation downloads is confusing - it would possibly be better to have them clearly marked “For Developers” and “For Servers”, or even better, a separate page for downloads (with a link much higher up the home page) that explains the versions a bit better.
The links with “forums” etc. are grey on grey and don’t really stand out - they don’t seem clickable - in fact, I completely missed the bar the first time I scrolled down the page.
Maybe it’s just me, but the buttons in the nav bar are backwards, the “About” button takes you further down the page than “Downloads” - clicking the buttons in sequence should take me down the page, not up?
“Sponge” is branded as “Sponge” on the navbar, and “SPONGE” on the home page. It should be more consistent across the whole site.
Don’t let my thoughts detract from the overall job though, it does look nice!
3. I have no immediate plans for it, but I really do like the idea of it being built in, could lead to some novel plugin ideas!
We definitely need this. It would make a lot of things a lot easier, especially since everyone who needs to store structures for their plugin is atm basically rewriting the same code over and over again.
So wait, I will be able to print an error WITH an helpful message without using the logger?! WONDERFUL!!!
Much better than the old one. One thing that I feel is a bit confusing is that the big icon links with the gray background seem kind of weird there as there is also the navbar to access the exact same things. Maybe place a big download button here instead?
Probably not personally as I don’t make that sort of plugins. I can see it being very useful though. Altough I do have something I might be able to user it for at some point.
Absolutely - if you have the ability to bring the specific details to human readable form consistantly like that,id hazard that a 25% increase in conversion rate in “i see more than 1 line of stuff, I can’t bother to read it” to “This may help me”, and even a 15% increase in “Perhaps i should show these lines to someone else to tell me which plugin is broke instead of hoping for a cold psychic read” at minimum will occur.
Its clean, its clear, its pulled aside, its obvious its where things blow up - it stands out amonsgt the explosion of code, and while to many who have no idea of computer code will not recognize its value, they will recognize its containerization of information as a summary of a key point.
Ah, Eliza - its been decades since that name conjures up a computer program (its been an biochemical assay for ages now), thanks for that flash of memory. Homepage is indeed very nice and functional, and will capture the eyes of new folks arriving to concrete the thought “this is much more than bukkit ever could be”
Definitely will make use of it for adding defined structures and resetting particular areas ie damagable arena volumes.
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