Below you can see a modified screenshot with the described changes and I look forward to see your opinions on this suggestion.
I want to apologize for the blurry image, but I made it in a hurry and I definettly need to improve my GIMP skills in the first place.
Hello everyone,
I have decided to open this topic just to have an open discussion about the webpage layout for games. First of all I want to say that this is just my personal opinion and I am not aware about the true reasons why the page looks the way it looks.
I made this topic with the sole purpose of contributing if I can at the overall ease of use and functionality of games webpage layout.
So the changes are just minor and they are aimed to improve the ease of use for users who for example have installed a game and they then need to find and install an Expansion or an Addon for that game. I was thinking that if there was a possibility in the “Suggest changes” panel for the comunity to link to other Lutris pages that contain those Expansions or Addons the user experience would be improved and navigating to the desired location would be easier.
Also there is another use case, for example a player may be aware of and wants to install GTA San Andreas, but he/she has no ideea that there is an Addon wich enables multiplayer, this proposal would mitigate that problem by informing the user there is a possibility if he wants to try it out.
In this moment if you search for Grand Theft Auto, you will find all GTA entries, but if you type San Andreas, you would find both GTA San Andreas and San Andreas Multiplayer, but with no mention of Multi Theft Auto, wich is another different Addon for the game.
This is just a single use case, but the change would work and benefit all the games that have linked content for them available on the Lutris platform, for example Warcraft III Reign of Chaos and it’s expansion Frozen Throne, in this moment you would install it, then hit the back button, then hit the Frozen Throne entry from the list, and then installing. I believe having a linked entry in Reign of Chaos would be a simpler and straight forward path for the user.
Also I believe that by moving the Patreon button closer to the eyesight would improve the possibility for users who want to support the project to do so, but that is just a guess.
I tried to make my suggestion as simple as I could imagine both for the ease of use and for an easy implementation.
Thank you for reading this and giving your feedback!
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I have to admit it was agreat talk. Sorry for the “necrobump”, now I will let the topic sink in.
There are some good ideas in there, most of them will likely be be implemented at some point.
At the moment we don’t have any way to keep track of mods / expansions and for many cases, mods should have installers on the game page itself, not requiring a new game entry.
I agree that the Patreon link should be more visible but I’m not sure this is the correct placement.
The home page will be redesigned as well soon and there is an ongoing effort to make the website more contributor friendly (see: https://github.com/lutris/website/projects/1)
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@strider it is good to see your feedback on this. My ideea was more simple than that, I was not suggesting an automated process to keep track of game expansions I was just thinking for a way for us, the community to link them manually, similar to how we add games webpages in the “Suggest Changes” or similar to how we add game installers, then we send them to moderation and that’s all.
For the mods part I agree, but there are exceptional mods, like San Andreas Multiplayer wich is more like a community expansion for the game and it is good and easy to install it directly from Lutris using the installer.
For the Patreon link I was just thinking for it to be more visible, the placement was just linked to the first ideea because it was easier to show all of them in one single screenshot.
EDIT: yes, now if I think of it it would be a great functionality to add mods or expansion directly on the game page entry instead of a separate one
The rule of thumb is that mods have installers in the parent game page and expansions in their dedicated page (they have a separate page on steam so we mimick that).
I’ll take note of the suggestions above and will probably implement some during the current ongoing update
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@strider it is good to hear that. I would try to help with coding myself, but unfortunatelly my expertise is only with C# and I am not that advanced to confortably begin to learn django and set up the entire environment to modify and test it properly in this moment.
If you can do C#, you can do Django, trust me, I was a C# dev at some point 
I will give it a try when I have some spare time to learn, but I was a bit scared of setting the entire development environment up as a noob in web dev
Actually, that would be a great way to make sure that our documentation for setting up a dev env is sane and up to date!
