Chris
Get me your address and I will get you a flash drive with all my minis and merch pics in a couple of weeks. I’ll zip through all my mini stuff and see if I need to take new pics for them (of the stuff I have) stuff I don’t actually have well have to use the pics ive gotten with my research on them. I’ll also take another look at the article I wrote and edit/add/clean it up some.
Chris here…
Easing myself into the new year and so I’m just getting set to set-up those template pages as requested, but have a couple of questions regarding them:
Re: the mini-figures template - MannyC, have you uploaded any of the modified photos you’ve been working on (like the example you posted up earlier in this thread) so that I could use one as an example? If you could upload some to the team directory (or wherever you think best to upload them) so that I have an example photo to use, I can jump on this ASAP! 
Re: the Merchandise, taking a look at the new site you’ll notice that there’s a section called Collectibles. At the moment this contains info about the various statue lines, but I believe this is where MannyF also wanted the vintage merchandise material to go as well - this seems very logical to me.
Now, in the design of the new WordPress site, you’ll notice that each main section has a “drop down” menu that allows you to jump to a particular area without having to go through an index page - however, I believe it only supports up to four sub-sections. At the moment there’s an empty area called “Features” - I’d like to propose to move this down so it falls off the bottom of the drop-down menu (as to be honest all the interviews and special features pertaining to the various statue lines have already been incorporated by Mark into those sections), and replace it with a sub-section entitled something like “Vintage 1980s Collectibles” (or something like that), which can then house all the merchandise we want to showcase.
Now (again), if you guys are cool with this, this flags up another question - do you want all the merchandise items (whatever they are) accessible off of one single index page, or do you want them to all be subdivided - so, you have a main index page with links to the various sub-sections (e.g., “Books”, “Clothing & Apparel”, “Novelty Items”, etc.) and their own individual index pages? If you guys would like the latter, then I can set that up no problem, it’s just a little bit more complicated and you’d need to decide beforehand what different categories you’d like within there…
I hope all of this makes sense - it’s kind of a complicated thing to explain. I’m very conscious of the fact that none of these are my sections and so I don’t want to look like I’m trying to impose my own ideas on you guys. If you can LMK what you think re: the above (and if you have any questions), that would be awesome - many thanks!
Hey Matt, this is very kind, thanks so much! I’ll PM you my address for you to send the flash drive to!
Take care…
I like this option…as far as categories we can decide those once i do a bit more editing and let you decide how to best group them.
As far as minis here is the location of the images:
Chris here…
OK gang, here’s a mini-figures template as requested - sorry this has taken me so long to do, Christmas rather disrupted my workflow, LOL!
http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/toys/kidworks-foreign-mini-figures/cheetara-argentina
Some notes about this page:
I had to resize the figure image to make it fit properly on the page. I gave it a width of 250px and this seemed to work well with the dimensions of this image. I notice MannyC that some of the images you’ve edited are still at the original size of 500px - 1000px, and if I’m honest these will need re-sizing (I’d suggest to a width of 250px so there’s a uniform look, with whatever height they automatically end up being after the width resize) otherwise they’ll be wider than the white space on the page!
In theory you could leave the images the way they are and just change the display properties for them in the HTML, but this will create a very slow-loading web page (if you’re taking an image of over 1000px and asking the page to display it at a quarter of that size) so IMO it would be best to re-size the images.
After I edited the image, I created a new folder for all the completed images to go in, which can be found here: http://www.thundercatslair.org/toys-images/mini-figures/ . This was done largely so I didn’t accidentally overwrite your original image! The image on this template page is linked directly from that new folder (the full address of the image is http://www.thundercatslair.org/toys-images/mini-figures/argcheetara.jpg ).
Fairly obviously, for all of these the “parent” page will need to be set to “Kidworks & Foreign Mini-Figures” - you’ll find that pretty easily!
Obviously as with the Prototypes and LJN Toy Guide pages you’ll need to adjust the alt text, title text and image size properties (if the images are all 250px wide it will just be the height properties you need to adjust for each image), as well as the name/location of the image and of course the text info (country of origin, etc.) for each one. You guys have done an amazing job with all the other templates I’ve fired at you, I know you’ll do a great job with this as well!
Re: the Merchandise, thanks for answering my earlier query. What I’ll do is for the first thing you guys want to add I’ll create an empty subsection for that which you can add to, then as and when you want any more categories I’ll go in and add those as needed.
Do you have any Merchandise images edited ready for upload that I can pick from to create the example page? If you could link me to some, then I should be able to put the template page together pretty quickly. Many thanks!
Take care…
I’d like to start work on putting the Panini Sticker Book and all the UK VHS videos up. I’m hoping to do some work on the toy section in the next few days if Wordpress permits…
Thanks Chris…youre right that even though the image can be resized by Wordpress that it would take a long time for the page to load. Ill go and resize them and begin work on the minis. I only have but a few days before i start my next college course but I expect to be done at least with the ones Ive edited so far
As far as Merchandise Ive edited a few already, Ill upload them tonight when i get home and resize them. Things are shaping up and Im glad we pulled this one together the way we have. If only we can figure out the damn banner issue but i can imagine that it should be a simple fix.
Neil: iIf you need watermarking on the Panini stickers and the VHS tapes let me know
Chris here…
Cool stuff - if you need any help with any of that, don’t hesitate to LMK and it’ll be my pleasure!
Awesome stuff, MannyC - as always, if you need any help with anything, give me a holler and I’ll do my best!
Excellent news! If you could link me to them once you’re done, and I can then whip up a template page!
Yeah, the banner is annoying the hell out of me - I’ve had a play around trying to fix it but can’t seem to locate the problem. This is something that needs fixing before we can relaunch first weekend of February, so I’ll get back in touch with MannyF and bring this back to the forefront of his attention - if push comes to shove we may need to get professional help with it, but I think the first thing we should do is contact StudioPress (who created the WordPress theme MannyF and Mark purchased to use as a template) and ask their advice, given that they created the template they should know all the ins and outs of it…
Take care…
Chris…here is the link to the merchandise images. Only two so far but i intend to do more editing this weekend. Should be enough to get the template started though
http://www.thundercatslair.org/merchandise/merchandise-edited/
Chris here…
Awesome - am I right in thinking I’m looking at various different angles of one of the TCats Burger King cups? If so, just so I know - is what I’m looking at here two different angles of the same item? Because if so, I’m asking myself whether some pages would benefit from having a Toy Viewer-type set-up (where there are several different angles, etc., for an item) and others have a set-up more like the Mini-Figures template I just did, depending on the item. What do you think?
Sorry to keep bombarding you with questions here, I just want to make sure I get all this stuff absolutely right for you guys! You’re doing amazing work and I want to try and support that as best as I can with the templates I’m coming up with.
Take care…
No problems Chris…the red thing is just the cap for the cups…I think they were meant sort of as a piggy bank. You can do a template like the minis since the images we have are only from one view
Chris here…
That’s awesome MannyC, thanks for that info - the template will follow very soon indeed!
Take care…
I dont know but Im getting seriously ****ed off at Wordpress…pages are very slow to load and sometimes take a minute or two and now i cannot make new pages because it is not opening. I dont know what it is but if the new site is going to crawl every time then thats gonna turn off a lot of people
Chris here…
Here’s a thread from WordPress’ own forums which seems to be a similar problem to ours: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-site-loading-extremely-slowly .
To give you a bit of insight into why it may happen…
On a “static” website like ThunderCats Lair is now, the site is basically a collection of actual HTML pages that are created on one of our computers, saved and then uploaded in the same way that someone would create, save and upload a picture, a video, or whatever. The pages that we upload sit on our web server and when someone clicks on a link, that web server presents that web page to the person who has requested it…
WordPress sites work differently in that whenever we create a new page, what we are effectively doing is uploading content to a database. Each page is treated as an entry into the database. When somebody clicks on a link to one of our pages, they send a message to the web server, which instructs the database to retrieve the information for that entry (i.e. the HTML code, text, pictures, etc.) - so, all web pages are actually being generated “on the fly” as someone attempts to access them…
This very message board actually works in exactly the same way, and is powered by PHP / MySQL - the same programming language / database combo that WordPress is powered by!
In theory, with a powerful web server, there shouldn’t be any significant latency issues when it comes to the server generating and presenting web pages. However, ThunderCats Lair is a MASSIVE website - so, if the server that this site is sitting on is suddenly getting a lot of traffic for some of the other websites that occupy the same server space (remembering that this site is not sitting on its own unique server - if we were we’d be paying a hell of a lot more for our web hosting), I can see how that would slow down a site like ours that is extremely large and (in the case of the WordPress version) makes a lot of calls to the server… 
A site that’s powered by WordPress that is much, much bigger than ThunderCats Lair is eBay - however, eBay is almost certain to be sitting on its own dedicated web server (God knows they can afford it) and so there are no other websites competing for the resources of that web server.
So, to summarise - I actually think the problem of the slow-loading site lies not with WordPress (even though database-driven sites will be a half-step slower than old-fashioned websites) but rather with our webhost (Hostmonster)? It wouldn’t surprise me to discover that the slow loading times we’re encountering are to do with another active database-driven site (or two, or three) being assigned to the same server that we’re on - to me it’s the answer that makes the most logical sense!
…All of which is probably a far more technical answer than you really wanted, LOL!! 
Take care…
Thanks Chris that makes sense…on a side note the Minis section is well on its way and could essentially be launched once the site goes live. There is minimal description on each but at least we’ll be able to launch it.
So far I have pages for 9 of 15 of the edited pictures and I should be having the rest done tomorrow.
For descriptions I will need either Matt or Neil to provide those since my knowledge on minis are very very minimal.
Manny post the links to all your pages you complete and I can then edit each page with more text info if need be. I’m assuming you haven’t used Andrew’s text from his old pages? If not then like I said I can edit it into each of your pages
Chris here…
OK guys, the Merchandise Section of the new site is now up-and-running! 
First things first - here’s the template: http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/collectibles/classic-1980s-merchandise/cups-cutlery-related/burger-king-bank-cup-tygra . In terms of what you guys will need to change about each page, to be perfectly honest I think after the LJN Toy Guide and Mini-Figures templates you guys will pick this up straight away!
The biggest thing you’ll need to do is change the Parent page depending on what the item is - I went ahead and created a number of sub-categories as suggested!
Here are the sub-categories I created - if you guys would like any more, or any of these re-titled, LMK and I’ll get on it, these were just the ideas I came up with!
Videos & DVDs (for all the official ThunderCats DVD and VHS releases from the US, UK and elsewhere)
Clothing & Apparel (t-shirts, etc.)
Cups, Cutlery & Related (this is where the template is located - truthfully, I struggled for ages to think of what to call this section, LOL! Basically I was thinking it would be where any TCats cups, plates, and other food-and-drink related stuff could go)
Books, Annuals & Magazines (for all the [story] books, UK Annuals, plus the US ThunderCats magazine [which wasn’t a comic] if we can get any info on it)
Coloring, Sticker & Activity Books (for the coloring + activity books I have, plus Neil’s sticker album)
Jigsaws & Games (for jigsaw puzzles + board games, etc.)
Stationary & School Supplies (for any TCats pencils / pencil toppers, etc., as well as school bags, maybe even lunchboxes, etc.)
Kids’ Bedroom Furnishings (wallpaper, curtains, duvet covers, etc. - I was just going to call it “Bedroom” but thought that sounded like an Inflatable Cheetara, LOL!!)
Miscellaneous (for anything that didn’t fit in any of the above, LOL!)
I’ve not forgotten that there’s also some other Toy Section stuff that needs transferring that doesn’t lend itself to template-based pages - these are on my “to do” list, I’ll post up any updates in this thread!
Take care…
That’s fantastic Chris! I think you have covered everything! My only nit pick is do we need seperate sections for Colouring books/Sticker Album and then Annuals/Books? Are there a lot of annual book type items that such as the sticker album will get lost among them? (to be honest I never was interested in books so much as a kid, so I genuinely have no idea!) However if so then you are right to make 2 seperate sections.
On another note I’m now done with those pages I needed to complete!
Just completed:
Grune The Destroyer
Ratar-O (black daggers)
Ratar-O (silver daggers)
Vultureman
Off now to the top of this thread to see what still needs doing I figured I’d do some more work while Wordpress is behaving
Merged Post:
Edit:
Just completed:
Hammerhand
Ram Bam
Top Spinner
Cruncher
Gonna take a stab at the Cats Lair playset! :eek:
EDIT 2: Cats Lair done too! I’m now having a go at editing the Mumm-Ra’s Tomb pics in anticipation of finally getting that up on the guide!!
EDIT 3:
Well I’ve had a good go at doing both Playsets, but as expected I’ve had a few hassles…both pages are not displaying correctly However I have a feeling they are simple fixes.
Chris could you take a look at them and adjust them for me?
The links are:
http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/toys/ljn/ljn-toy-guide/cats-lair
http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/toys/ljn/ljn-toy-guide/mumm-ras-tomb-fortress
I think it’s likely my fault screwing up the tables somehow…ok I’m off to bed now! Been a while since I stopped up this late!! lol :eek:
Chris here…
Hey Neil, well done with all your fantastic work here!
There are a fair few different ThunderCats story books, enough that I would worry about the sticker album and suchlike getting lost in the shuffle - I did toy with the idea of making all book-related stuff one subsection but decided against it for that reason. There are 6 Annuals (that I can recall), plus several storybooks (I believe I personally own 4 or 5, and there are several I’m missing), so I thought it was best!
Hey Neil, I took a look at those pages - unfortunately I think what you fell victim to is either what can happen when you try and edit these pages visually using WordPress’ visual interface, or working off of a template that has somehow gotten altered via the visual interface…
Unfortunately one of the most irritating things I’ve found about WordPress is that if I set up a page using the HTML tab and then tab it over to the Visual tab, in the process of doing that the WordPress software is configured to make judgements about things I’ve set up in the HTML - for example, if I’ve set a page up so that it has a large amount of white space (breaking spaces) between one line and the next, tabbing over to the visual interface it assumes “Oh, that must be a mistake!” and deletes all the extra line breaks! :mad: When I then tab back over to the HTML interface, my line breaks will have been deleted from there as well… :mad:
Anyway, it’s no big deal - I went in and fixed the pages, Cats Lair was pretty much fine apart from the very bottom line (about the guide to assemble it coming soon), Mumm-Ra’s Tomb needed a bit more work, I actually rebuilt the Toy Viewer section because some of the Javascript code that makes the viewer work had been deleted and so some images wouldn’t display in their full-sized version. Anyways, it’s no problem and you’ve done a great job given how temperamental WordPress can be! Take a look at the pages and make sure I’ve corrected everything OK, if you need anything else changing, LMK and I’ll get on it as soon as I can!
Again, well done for all this excellent work - you guys rock the casbah!!
Take care…
I’ve changed the Cats Lair page around a bit to stay consistent with the rest of the toy guide pages (Toy viewer images all having a black background)
Then I moved the other images into the correct ‘Accessories’ section of the page. I think it looks much better now. Can you take a look and let me know what you think?
I also changed the Parts guide to Related Links (I was going to add this anyway) but it took the ‘Parts Guide’ section because I wanted to leave mention of that off for the simple reason, I have no idea what time scale ‘coming soon’ will be, as I’ll need to get my Cats Lair out to take the pics for that feature! and getting the Lair out can be a task!
Thanks for looking at those pages for me and I’ll check out the Mumm-Ra’s Tomb page now.
Oh one problem I have noticed on numerous pages is the fact that text is out of alignment with it’s title description (for example the text for the ‘Description’ on the Cats Lair page top line of text doesn’t align with the ‘Description’ title)
Chris here…
Just checked the page out - definitely agree, looks 100 times better now, great job!
Hmmmm, yeah, now you mention it I’ve just seen that - truthfully, I have no idea why that should be happening as both table cells are set to align their content near the top! 
I’ll try and look into that and see if there’s a quick fix I can come up with - really cannot see why that should be happening…
EDIT: Oh BTW, if you want to add the link to the Cats Lair instructions in the new page you’ve just put together, they’re located here: http://www.thundercatslair.org/relaunch/toys/ljn/toy-overview/thundercats-toy-instructions/cats-lair
Take care…
