As part of our rolling upgrades to libcom.org version 5, we are very happy today to be launching a new theme, developed in collaboration with the Yalla web development cooperative.
This is a major step in the ongoing upgrade which we have been working on since 2018. We launched a basic functioning version 5 of the site in March last year, and since then have been making minor improvements and working on a visual overhaul of the site.
Thanks to support from those of you who donated to our GoFundMe and our patreon supporters, we were able to engage the services of Yalla, a web development cooperative based in London and Palestine.
Working with us, Yalla have built us a beautiful custom theme, bringing back the red feature colour of our old theme, and introducing new visual features. One of these is a new logo, based on a long-running in-joke on our access denied page, which no one can quite remember the origins of.
So we hope you enjoy the new look of the site, which should highlight our different features and ways of navigating the site better, and make content more readable. If you have any technical issues or spot any bugs or errors please just drop us a comment here.
This new theme is not the end of our upgrade, we are still planning a number of major improvements over the coming months and years, including a What You See Is What You Get text editor, to make contributing articles and comments easier, and a user dashboard, to browse new stuff more simply.
As always, we are keen to have new contributors, either writing original content for us, or uploading texts to our archive, so if you are interested in getting involved let us know in the comments.
Let us know what you think of the new theme in the comments, and please share this announcement on social media and encourage people to check out our new look!
libcom.org collective
Comments
Looking sharp!
Looking sharp!
Nice one! Definitely looks…
Nice one! Definitely looks better :-) good work.
No biggie, but the enormo…
No biggie, but the enormo images on larger screens mean that some of them are now a bit pixellated. A lot of images I've used have been nicked from elsewhere and there don't appear to be bigger ones available, so I suspect we just need to accept that.
Rob Ray wrote: Looking sharp…
Thanks Rob! We are very pleased with it. More improvements coming soon...
Fozzie wrote: No biggie, but…
Yeah unfortunately don't think there is any way around that
Looks good! (What's this…
Looks good! (What's this stuff about "peace and fucking" though?) Also, I've been meaning to mention that it seems that links that are not "https" appear to be converted to https, which ends up making the links not work. Here's an example, VVAW. That's supposed to go here, http://www.vvaw.org/ (but it shows a broken page instead).
Nice!
Nice!
(But what happened to the pull quotes?)
First in with a callous and…
First in with a callous and uncalled for mutilation of the new logo:
adri wrote: Looks good! …
That was a Nathan Barley joke I put in the draft which I thought catch would edit out before posting, but I think he didn't spot it! It's gone now
thanks, we will look into this. But that won't be to do with the new theme, that will be a general thing related to the upgrade last year.
Fozzie wrote: First in with…
ha nice one, love it!
My humble contribution...
My humble contribution...
Joakim wrote: Nice! (But…
They are gone for now. Although the data is still there so we could potentially bring them back at some point. They weren't filled in very systematically though and they did take up a huge part of the page on the site because a whole extra column was being used, which didn't really make sense for such a feature which wasn't used very much.
damn, those penguins are brutal
libcom.org of course…
libcom.org of course condemns seal clubbing in the strongest possible terms and in whatever shape or form (even if seals are all terrible animals and the bourgeois oppressors of penguins/the proletariat).[1]
1. This condemnation does not extend to subsistence and non-market oriented practices.
Nice to see that penguin…
Nice to see that penguin becoming the face of libcom. It was always the most memorable image of the site. Best ever error page and many others have tried very hard.
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(No subject)
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Heh heh.
Heh heh.
Rob Ray wrote: Sous le…
Sous le glacier, la plage
Loving all of these! TBH…
Loving all of these! TBH Photoshop potential is one of the reasons we wanted to go with a penguin. Also we have to give a shout out to nemo/omen for their sterling work making the access denied image back in the day. For some reason lost to the winds of time...
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Libcom.org would like to…
Libcom.org would like to point out that any similarity or relationship between their logo and the logo of any commercial book publishers is purely coincidental
The new look is excellent!
The new look is excellent!
Heyo libcom collective. I…
Heyo libcom collective. I welcome these developments. I have a bit of a nickpick though. The concept for the new logo is great, but it's a bit of a Rorschach test and unlike the libcom star, it doesn't immediately clear what it is. I think the logo could use more refinement to make it clearer it's a penguin.
Comrades, great changes -…
Comrades, great changes - but when a link to a libcom article with a built in picture is put in a thread or comment on Facebook the thumbnail picture which appears is of a penguin - half of the penguin - and not the picture which is connected to the article.
(:-/)
Body text in articles and…
Body text in articles and comments seems to have gone bold today?
Fozzie wrote: Body text in…
Should be fixed now.
Yep
Yep
I'm curious as to why when i…
I'm curious as to why when i link a piece, the lib com penguin shows up and not the original page graphic/photo etc?
kasama_libsoc wrote: Heyo…
We tested it with a big group of people before agreeing it, and everyone could identify it. Of course, with a bigger sample, there will always be some who can't, but that's not necessarily a problem. We went through a long process developing the logo and that work is now complete so it will not be changing for the foreseeable future.
Quite a few people have been mentioning the old star logo, which I find quite amusing because we actually stopped using it 11 years ago!
Nemo Etomer wrote: Comrades,…
We will look into this and see if there is something we can do about it
Body text of articles looks…
Body text of articles looks kosher. Kind to my grumpy eyes.
Joakim wrote: Body text of…
Glad to hear it! One thing we have ensured with the new theme is that accessibility of everything is as good as possible
But italics look awful in…
But italics look awful in body text
New galleries do not show up…
New galleries do not show up in recent content/discussions:
https://libcom.org/article/nasty-secretary-liberation-front
Joakim wrote: But italics…
Can you give us a link to an example? Body text shouldn't have more than one or two words in italics in any case.
Fozzie wrote: New galleries…
Thanks for spotting, will add this to the list of stuff to look at
New galleries do not show up…
Should be here now: https://libcom.org/recent
Thanks Mike. Er, dunno if it…
Thanks Mike. Er, dunno if it’s a thing or not but there is no commenting/discussion under galleries now either?
syndicalist wrote: I'm…
this should be fixed now! Thanks for pointing it out. If you have any further problems let us know
Thanks Mike. Er, dunno if it…
It's been like that since the new site launched, but I can't remember why we didn't enable it, possibly because we knew we'd want to re-do how galleries work, but that's already happened, we could probably just switch it on.
Mike Harman wrote: Thanks…
yeah I can't see a reason not to allow it so I think we should
Comments on galleries is set…
Comments on galleries is set up now.
Nice :-)
Nice :-)
Also old comments on…
Also old comments on existing galleries are back. :)
Seems that quotes with bold…
Seems that quotes with bold text in them have been cut off (i.e. where the bold text begins)? This seems to apply to both comment quotes and article quotes. Might make it difficult to follow some articles/discussions. Just thought it's worth mentioning.
adri wrote: Seems that…
Could you give us a link to an example to check out?
I had to edit a couple of my…
I had to edit a couple of my comments where I added bold to quoted text for emphasis. I don't know of any articles off the top of my head that have quotes with bold text, but I'm sure I've come across some before. I also tested it out with one of my articles; the bold text is still there when you edit it, but it just doesn't appear in the article/comment. Here's an example if it helps (there's supposed to be bold text there, but it doesn't show),
Thanks for this, we will…
Thanks for this, we will look into it
Looks great!
Looks great!
Khawaga wrote: Looks great! …
cheers, glad you like it
start of bold text: here's…
This is fixed now.
The columns of text in your…
The columns of text in your articles are harder to read now because they're so wide. The text spacing is very crunched and I suggest increasing the spacing size. I sent you a message on mastodon under another anon handle with screenshots to compare it to a site with an easier to read layout.
I think the site looks good but the text issue seems important to address.
Comrade Motopu wrote: The…
We haven't seen that. Could you send us a link to where you have attached the screenshots?
On this page https://libcom…
On this page https://libcom.org/article/militant-unions-backbone-movement-socialism, I noticed that when I highlighed some text the blue highlight from the lower line covers some of the text from the line above. I'm on my laptop. Hardly a major issue but thought I'd mention it, the new style is very good btw.
Uncreative wrote: On this…
Thanks very much for the feedback. Yes, highlighting text does make a blue overlap, but this is a consequence of the font, which we don't necessarily think is a problem.