Forum upgrade

Post by **hubird** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 6:24 pm

you must be from the MTV generation

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 7:58 pm

Thanks erminardi for these cool new icons.
I'll swap them in.

Our user valis has some experience with phpBB themes, and has offered to spend some time cleaning up the current theme to fix colors/icons/sizes, etc.

It'll take some time, so please be patient.

I'll try to keep adding new stuff, as we go.

Cheers,
-John

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 8:41 pm

Ok, I swapped in erminardi's icons- I think the animation may be a bit overkill. With all the hot topics animating, I get a little motion sick looking at the index page

I ironed out some other little issues. We'll keep improving it

-John

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 9:24 pm

hubird wrote: I already miss the old smilies!

I just put the "classic" smilies from our old forums back in.

Nestor wrote:Could we perhaps build and replace the icons ourselves? I mean, can you get into the emoticons and change them for other gif images or is it not possible?

Yes, it's possible.

For more smilies discussion, see over here:
http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20373

-John

Post by **garyb** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 9:30 pm

thanks for the old smilies!

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Mon Oct 23, 2006 10:06 pm

Following a couple folks' suggestions, I reorganized the main forum index to be in a (hopefully) more logical order.

It may take some getting used to, if your eyes automatically go to a certain place on the screen to check your favorite forums. But I think it won't take long to adjust.

Let me know if I totally screwed it up

Cheers,
-John

Audiographe · Post by **Audiographe** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:46 am

RSS Request

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=349668
Installation Level: Easy
Installation Time: ~ 5 Minutes

Thanks.

@+

erminardi · Post by **erminardi** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:55 am

John Cooper wrote:Ok, I swapped in erminardi's icons- I think the animation may be a bit overkill. With all the hot topics animating, I get a little motion sick looking at the index page

I ironed out some other little issues. We'll keep improving it

-John

Hey, it's not my blame... the PlanetZ forum is full of busy treads, so: a lot of little moving icons!

Anyway the old "flaming" icon was not so different

I think that in this way all is more readable & ergonomic.

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 1:05 am

John Cooper wrote:Following a couple folks' suggestions, I reorganized the main forum index to be in a (hopefully) more logical order.
Let me know if I totally screwed it up
Cheers,
-John

The new order makes me feel dizzy & doesn't all make sense to me, so it may not be entirely logical (yet) John.

Anyway, thanks for everything.

erminardi · Post by **erminardi** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 1:20 am

hubird wrote:you must be from the MTV generation

Shroomz~> · Post by **Shroomz~>** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 1:24 am

If you go into a fit of spasms & loose control of your body, you're having an epileptic fit ...

kylie · Post by **kylie** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 4:21 am

first of all... thanks for announcing. last weekend I used the IE for the first time to watch the forum and was shocked first. could there be such a different look and all just by switching from mozilla to IE? I refused to believe, went on reading, and suddenly it all started to make sense

but there's no light without shadow...
it was possible before to modify the sort order of posts within a forum by clicking on the row description. I mostly felt the desire to sort by last post/reply. this functionality seems to have gone. can this be re-enabled?

tia,

-greetings, markus-

valis · Post by **valis** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 7:02 am

The forum should currently be sorting threads by the ones with the most recent replies (or most recently posted). The only threads that will be above that are stickies & notices.

I appreciate John giving me the opportunity to help contribute to our community here. I'll try to spend some time this week doing basic color tweaks and perhaps a bit of an icon update.

petal · Post by **petal** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 8:14 am

Since I'm actually allowed to pay attention to the minor details here I'll add a few comments.

1. The colour of the light blue bar on top of every thread, and the "post a reply" that I can see while writing here, and the bar which is labelled: "Add an Attachment" etc, doesn't seem to match the rest of the colour scheme used on the PlanetZ. It just doesn't seem right. While all the other colours seem "dusty" in quality and therefore soft (and nice to look at) these bars has a more plastic-shiny cheap quality to it... or maybe it's jut me?

2. This partly also goes for the old PlanetZ-logo, but I can understand if it is "untouchable"

3. I not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but the buttons "Add Attachment", "Preview" and "Submit" are almost impossible to read. Orange on grey doesn't seem to bring out the right contrast.

But all this is minor details - overall I'm just happy that PlanetZ exists and thrives

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 9:44 am

You're right that some of the colors don't quite match. The light blue bars were something leftover in the template I was using. That's something that I hope Valis can take care of

There have times when I wanted to change the planetz logo. Unfortunately, a friend of mine made it, many years ago, on an SGI workstation which was later turned into a doorstop, and then probably recycled for parts. The original files are all gone. I still really like it, but have no way to tweak it. Everytime I tried a different logo, I ended up coming back to this one. So if the colors don't quite match, we'll just have to live with it

As for the buttons- orange on gray- i thought i had fixed that!! (On my post-reply screen here, they look fine black on gray). Can you tell me exactly where you're seeing them wrong/? (Again this is something valis can probably tidy up in the proper way, but if you point me to the offending screen, I'll try to stick a bandaid in the code

Cheers,
John

kylie · Post by **kylie** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 9:56 am

valis wrote:The forum should currently be sorting threads by the ones with the most recent replies (or most recently posted). The only threads that will be above that are stickies & notices.

yes, this is now default. I nevertheless liked the old default, where you could see what's new, even if there was no reply yet. being a week off, one could miss some new stuff, just because there was heavy traffic on older topics. checking first for new topics, then sorting for last posts was a quite nice way to start the day...

since you have no chance to revert the sorting order at this time it's... well just sub-optimal...

-greetings, markus-

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:18 am

RSS is installed. You can now add a live bookmark to your browser window, which will list the latest posts.

Cheers,
-John

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:25 am

kylie wrote:it was possible before to modify the sort order of posts within a forum by clicking on the row description. I mostly felt the desire to sort by last post/reply. this functionality seems to have gone. can this be re-enabled?

Sorting posts by column heading was my of my (many) code-additions to the phpBB 1.4. I like it too - which is why I added that code

However, one of the big downsides of all my customizations to the code was that it made upgrading the forums very very difficult. This time, I'm going to try to avoid personalized mods, as much as possible. This way, when phpBB 3.0 is ready, we can switch over relatively easy...

Cheers,
-John

petal · Post by **petal** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 11:22 am

I'm seeing the orange on grey buttons on the login screens and the reply screens (like the one I'm typing this in now)

I don't know if it's of any imporatance in this situation but I'm using the Microsoft internet explorer.

Oh I just checked in Mozilla, where it looks fine, so the problem is prolly Microsoft specific... go figure

Internet Explorer is infamous for these kinds of errors.

Cheers!
Thomas

kylie · Post by **kylie** » Tue Oct 24, 2006 11:43 am

hi john,

John Cooper wrote: Sorting posts by column heading was my of my (many) code-additions to the phpBB 1.4. I like it too - which is why I added that code

maybe you consider sharing your modifications with the developers, so it could be a standard feature in later versions. I suppose there is a lot of people who would like it...

However, one of the big downsides of all my customizations to the code was that it made upgrading the forums very very difficult. This time, I'm going to try to avoid personalized mods, as much as possible. This way, when phpBB 3.0 is ready, we can switch over relatively easy...

I see... it's beta2 right now, which means nothing, of course. did you check whether our beloved feature will be included in 3.0 anyway, or if it would be easy to re-implement it later?

-greetings, markus-

ps. I'm already about to miss it... *sniff*

pps. afair there was a list in the faq, describing the various levels of pulsar geekdom. not that I expect to breathe fire or levitate too soon, but...