Synfig.org is a great portal with everything you need collected into one entity, documentation, manuals, downloads etc. That’s for everything but this forum which seems to be a completely different thing on it’s own.
The most desired thing would be a complete integration of the forum with the rest of the portal, see my quick mockup, but I realise this would involve quite some work and may have a lot of troubles connected to it.
The second best thing would be to have the current forum a little more connected to the portal. As it is now I can’t find even a link to the main site if it’s not buried in some thread. Clicking the logo at top just takes you back to the forum index, which you can just as easily reach by clicking the “Board index” link just below it. Perhaps have this Synfig-shield send you back to the main portal instead?
Yes, it would be nice to see the forum integrated into the main site. However, I have some slightly different ideas. Just my opinion here:
I tend to hate forum integration into sites that uses a sidebar. Personally, I like space… I would suggest updating the header, but leaving out the sidebar. This could be done more easily and without having to resort to frames (I dislike frames because they add extra scrollbars). Since the “log in/register account” for the wiki might confuse forum users into thinking it is forum registration, I propose doing a header that instead incorporates most of the sidebar links.
For my idea (not rylleman’s)… phpBB must have a header file It should be named prominently in the filesystem. Then it should be a simple task of HTML editing. I can’t really help on the server side since I don’t actually have a phpBB directory structure to look at, but I can try designing a header bar if needed.
