Stackoverflow clone using Rails, Mongomapper and Mongodb
gitorious.org
gitorious.org
(My project is at http://wowqu.com - it's quite a bit more domain-specific, but it's been a lot of fun anyhow. :)
The "Questions, People, Ask a Question" are kind of the same way. The white font looks a little off -- I might try a slightly softer off-white color, but it also makes them stand out. A more experienced UI guy could tell you more about it, certainly.
The login and signup aren't nearly prominent enough, I think. I had a hard time finding them. If I played with the app more, I might discover that you've solved the problem by prompting for login/registration on actions, which is where I think they ought to be, or something, but they're also a little blah.
Lastly (and this is actually parallel to the adwords, but I'm throwing it in because you asked) the double-turn-down effect on the search just bugs me. I don't know why. If it were rounded on both ends, I'd probably be fine. If they turned in opposite directions (ala Digg) I'd probably be fine. It also doesn't scream 'search' to me either.
These might be the amateurish ramblings of a novice UI guy, so take them all with a grain of salt, but I'd at least try to get some consultation with somebody with more experience.
I really do love the layout, so please don't take any offense. I only say because you asked, and I really think the overall design is nice, even if you hadn't said you weren't a designer. The colors work, the transition from blue to white in the content layer is solid. The wraparound labels on the informational boxes may as well be gold-plated. The 'answers' and 'votes' buttons are splendid too. Like I said, I like it.
The nav items up there are definitely not optimal. I've been feeling that, too, but I haven't found the right solution to them yet.
Login and signup could be a lot more prominent, definitely.
The search box style is a rendering bug, due to how different browsers handle border-radius; I have that set to 15px, which produces nice round ends in Firefox, but Webkit renders 15px of rounding on the top corners, then tries to do the bottom corners and doesn't have any room left. It's on the to-fix list.
I really appreciate your feedback. I'm as much a novice as anyone here, and I absolutely recognize that I'm probably breaking about sixty-six critical laws of design somewhere, so feedback is good. I very much appreciate constructive criticism - thank you, very much.
And yes, having Bugzilla, Redmine and company out there does lower the cost of FogBugz. It's called "competition".
You guys have managed to rip off / borrow stackoverflow's look and feel ( which is good ) and moved the all text a few pixels off center, shade icons that were unshaded, resize GUI elements. If you going to take so many GUI elements, why not take everything?
The theme I linked to is not our main theme, the main them is this one: http://shapado.com
People are free to make the SO theme look more like SO if they want to.
Your not alone, the chromium team should have said no to themes as well.
I support open source software, but who is going to sit down and do this painstaking work. It's easier to work on theming or mongodb, rather than make the titles spaced correctly ( for example ).
Gotta love random estimates by people who never looked at the code or anything.
Or you are in a country that Fogcreek can't do business with
Or you want a site on a topic that FC, or their bankers, or their VC or their government don't want you to have one on
Or you want an internal secure site for your society, company, hospital, police force
This is the real win in my opinion. On the open web, the SE sites are not just about the technology -- that is quite a small part of the problem.
Internally, especially in smaller companies, involvement is less of an issue and the technology becomes are more significant part of the problem. This is where I see a lot of opportunity for Shapado.
No company is going to have it's knowledge base on someone else's servers - especially not any industry 'knowledge rich' (urghhh) enough to need an SE site
Duplicating SO makes no sense to me, duplicating SE makes a lot of sense to me.
There are a lot of good discussion sites running terrible software, like LtU and Perlmonks. This would allow them to keep their communities intact but actually run software that doesn't actively discourage contributions. (Ever use Perlmonks? That's why people hate Perl!)
But I'll be damned if I can't think of a worse fit for any of these people than a SO-style QA-wiki. The last thing they need is fucking badges!
It is based on Django I think.
As a bit tounge-in-cheek comment: Will Stackoverflow clones become the new Twitter clients and the new new Hello World, demonstrating the capabilities of technologies?
Everything that becomes popular is quickly cloned. Example: http://www.chatroulette-clone.net/ .. Scripts that cloned Alex Tew's "Million Dollar Homepage" were out within weeks too :-)
Not seen any compelling HN clones but since HN is already open source..
(we also have a mirror on github http://github.com/patcito/shapado)
Of course, the question is: did you build it in a weekend? ;)
edit: thanks by the way :)
There are also some SE sites desperately trying to change the language through javascript-based rewriting (since SE is not localisable) - shapado could help them a lot.
Seriously though, I do think there's a correlation between how somebody believes something should look and what framework they choose, even if only subconsciously, and even if only rarely, that gives the impression that Rails apps look a certain way.
That said, there are defaults on the template generation of each, but the Django defaults are only for the 'Welcome' page, and it doesn't scaffold templates, and I agree that the Rails-scaffolded templates (that a lot of designers probably just extend, vs. replacing altogether) look better than a lot of pages in general.
def viewed!
self.collection.update({:_id => self._id}, {:$inc => {:views_count => 1}}, :upsert => true)
end