A New Look for CodePlex

As I mentioned a month ago, we have been working on improving the overall experience for the CodePlex community.  Today, I am happy to announce the release of CodePlex’s new look!  Our goal was to refresh the look and feel of the site to a modern Metro-inspired theme.

This is the first step in our continued investment to improve the usability within the site.  Please let us know your feedback!  Also, if you see any bugs or something that doesn’t look quite right in the new pages contact us with the link.

Here are some highlights of the new look released today:

Redesigned Home Pages

We wanted to make it easier to find common actions within CodePlex.  So now within the public home, and your logged in home page, you will find large tiles that take you to common actions such as creating or finding a project. 

 

 

Simple Project Creation

We also made it easier to create new projects.  Previously to create a project it was multiple fields, agreement checkboxes, and a CAPTCHA, spread out over three pages. 

 

 

 

Now, creating a project is two fields and selection of your source control preference.  Much simpler. 

 

We have more things coming, and as always we are very focused on providing users what they ask for, so continue submitting your ideas and voting for feature suggestions!  You also can always find us on Twitter at @codeplex or @mgroves84

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  and one more time the usable fixed with is a bit smaller. :((((

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  the cancel button is missing in the edit mode for a wiki page. thanks again

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  all table borders is missing on the pages for me. incredible.... sorry, I'm sick of it.

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  @Sebastian - got a link to a page?

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  @Matt Hawley http://netoffice.codeplex.com

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  Can we finally change our project names if we made a mistake in the name?

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  The overall look is nice, but I really hate the trend toward narrow fixed width layouts.

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  You need to have a hard look at Work Item performance!

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  Please let us create developer's page on CodePlex! username.codeplex.com!

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  This is odd, you go to view a change set, and it's a list of links, click on 'diff' for one of the files, and it shows the difference between the current file and the previous changeset, in fixed-width, whereas viewing the file itself is variable width.  When you go from viewing the difference in the changeset view, back to the commit listing, and the files show up differently, in a way that's actually easier to read (using alternating background colors for each change item.) The new look is cleaner, but for some reason it makes a burning rage build inside me.  Probably because most pages using tables are harder to follow, and you 'fixed' what wasn't broken.

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  The contrast between the foreground color and the background color is horrible. If you don’t have the best monitor and a perfect light situation in a closed office then the new design is not readable anymore. Please improve this.

• Anonymous
  April 30, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  All this has done is trash the UI for anyone not using an insanely large screen. I don't want a browse button that's more than twice the height of my taskbar. Perhaps add an option for those of us who hate the new theme to use the old one? It's much much more readable, and in general usable on smaller screens.

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  Thanks for the feedback, we are looking to improve the contrast and several of the other issues with table formatting.  

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  Old look was much better and clearer IMHO

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  Much better design, but hard to not miss the old one. Just searching is not working on Windows Phone.

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 01, 2012
  Still can't find a way... but is it possible now to see the Codeplex homepage in the same view as if you weren't logged in (ie., without the activity stream)?

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2012
  Not bad, very Windows 8 ;) Two things, there is a big difference in views between a logged in user and not. How can a logged in user see the Most Downloaded etc? The activity section needs to be just a small side window and provide the other three windows (Most Downloaded etc) in the main window. Even better would be to implement web parts! The other is a one-click search button on the main page to filter on Category. Combining this with the Most Downloaded etc would be great too (filter options). I don't want to have to try and search for something, then filter.

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2012
  Great to see Microsoft moving according to tendency. Simple and succinct forms, clean design, Git, etc... Thanks!

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2012
  Please broaden the left side, no one needs the ultra big download button. No 640 px width screenshot fits there without being cropped to ugliness.

• Anonymous
  May 03, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 04, 2012
  It's refreshing not to have that annoying EULA hassle! It's like the opposite of that horrible practice of making you scroll all the way to the bottom of it.

• Anonymous
  May 05, 2012
  Nice new design, I support it! Now there is a problem with the stylesheet. The Project Name and "Download" Buttons are supposed to be 'Segoe UI Light', but apparently, your CSS made them 'sans-serif'. Please fix!

• Anonymous
  May 08, 2012
  The new code plex ui is harder to read. It looks simpler and elegant at first but then is difficult to make out some parts since everything is so light. There is no contrast at all.

• Anonymous
  May 10, 2012
  I like the old look better.  The color purple is not good.  Like the color green and the old symbol. Please change back to the original.

• Anonymous
  May 12, 2012
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2012
  I am not qualified or have any ideawhat to do or say here.

• Anonymous
  June 07, 2012
  I don't like the trend towards big, bigger, biggest. Do they think I am blind? Labels with a size of 17px...  No more then a view items to see when viewing a list.  And the contrast...  Well, the lack of it, actually. Nothing wrong with a clean design, but why so big??

• Anonymous
  June 21, 2012
  Nice new chrome guys. I dig it.

• Anonymous
  October 15, 2012
  I am having a big problem.  I did not see it mentioned here so I thought I would post it.  I cannot see any details right below each category.  It looks like the detail is way at the bottom.  What do I need to do to get the screen to display correctly? Home Source Code Downloads Documentation Discussions Issue Tracker People License

• Anonymous
  October 15, 2012
  @Waterbug forever, based on your description it looks like you may be using IE7. CodePlex no longer supports IE7.

• Anonymous
  November 29, 2013
  I have been reading this site for quite a while. It gave much insight about this current issue. Many issues have got new perspective here. Posts and design are nice. I would be thankful if you keep on posting here. www.youtube.com/watch