Posted by member 385545 on 2007-10-13 10:11:52 link

Hello again,

1. Great, I really think that will help spreading the word a bit. There's nothing worse than small thumbed screenshots on which it's impossible to see what's going on.

2. I'm not much of a writer. Well, actually I enjoy writing, but my knowledge about the pros of LiteStep is limited, as I have only been playing around with it for a few days now.

I have absolutely no experience with scripting/coding/markup (whatever is needed to make this nice shell tick), so I have no idea how to make a complementary top 5 (or similar) of LiteStep.

That being said I think there's information on the front page that ought not be there. The front page should ONLY tell about the product, and/or other product related news. This part...
Before you get to comfortable and sign-up as a new user though; you should know of a couple policies. First, we have a "be nice" policy...so no flaming. And secondly, there is a time-out limit on the site of 15 minutes, and its not changing.

... is not appropriate front page material and should be tucked away and put on the register page.

I'm not too keen on the whole front page layout. The design is great but it hinders usability and functionality compared to other websites with a portal-ish frontpage. Naturally, This is a matter of taste, and I'm a bit conservative so don't take it personal. ;)

3. I guess we will never know when people don't bother replying...

4. Hmm okay, I should have installed LiteStep first and tried out a few themes before proposing some rough ideas for an LiteStep installer. Now that I have tried it out for a few days and fiddled around with ten different themes that I picked up on various websites, I'll write some more about this.

From my brief experience the worst part of LiteStep is the add-on "community" or rather the lack of it. I think I have up to seven or eight different versions of the same mod. Why is there no focal point for the mods? Shake up the mod community and gather them! If any of you play World of Warcraft you should know about ACE(2) located at wowace.com, the mods located at files.wowace.com, and how their installer WAU is working. Why not make something similar with the LiteStep mods?

Have a central base where ALL LiteStep mods are kept and updated. When people install a theme, LiteStep will fetch (just like it does now) the needed and most recent build of the module(s). Of course, this requires theme creators to keep their themes updated, so that theme functionality doesn't break if a mod is suddenly updated using a new method of handling something. LiteStep itself could feature an auto-update function, which checks and update the installed mods. This update can be set to check at a scheduled time (e.g. once per day) or triggered manually.

By the way, I have seen so many cool themes around the internet but they're not OTS2 compliant making them impossible to install. Maybe if you have a person with some decent theme taste to browse the net, pick a handful of those really great-looking ones and have them updated and put on this website, that way you'd have more to offer newcomers.

I would personally love to do update them myself, but the amount of time I would have to put into this (just to understand how a theme is made) is sadly more than I can handle. And admittedly I don't have that much of a knack for understanding the theme coding/scripting - at the moment I am struggling to fix a theme (non|step II) because even though it's slightly broken it still fits my needs perfectly.

Cheers. :)