Geeklog Forums

I've just installed my latest forum code on this site for testing. This release includes a lot of changes. The last release just over a month ago was ver 2.2RC1. I've made too many changes so this will have to ver 2.3.

Major changes to template files - I themed all the core release themes on this site in about 10 min. Changing about 4 CSS declarations per theme.

I've replaced all the quote and code handling logic to address the reported issues. It is now possible to use multiple code blocks, use quotes inside code blocks and won't be interpretted.

echo "This is a test for user: " . $_USER['username'];
echo "This is a  emoticon";
[/code]  
Additionally

New Navbar
Reorganized layout
Additional and hopefully all language now extracted
Editing posts with CODE blocks now reverts back to BB Code
Found and fixed some 30 other issues

Please give it a good test and report any problems.
				


Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com			

sweetness

you rock Blaine!!

I noticed on posts with more than 1 page that it doesn't have a "next page" option?? or am i just blind?

and where's the download?

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-- destr0yr
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

Thanks -- missed that. Fixed now.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

and the download for it?

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-- destr0yr
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

Not yet .. as soon as I have new contributions of say $1000, made to my paypal acct it will be available. I figure that will be in about 10 years at the rate folks have contributed so far

I will be sending it shortly to all my contributors.

This version was a lot of work -- we can enjoy it here for now.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

*thinks to himself* oooh.. glad i contributed then

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-- destr0yr
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

Now where'd I put my wallet

Thank you, Blaine!

You always have given much much more than I (or we) contributed.

Those who haven't yet done so, dig deep!

Sam

there are some "new topic" table issues.

Maybe you can be just a bit more clear and specific. What issues and what theme or all?

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

When creating a new topic the options: area is skewed for all themes accept Xsilver.

Looking nice

Can you change the centerblock so that it takes you to the entire thread instead of only the most recent post?

This appears to be a preference depending on user. I added a icon to the topic header so that once you have read the last post you could easily see the complete thread.

Does that help or even still it's not what you would prefer

I can make this a site configureable option but there are really many ways to program this block. Show posts, view last reply, last poster etc... I've got all variatiions and maybe I will offer these as extra later.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

Oh, ok. I guess I would argue that I would never want to see only the last post via the center block, because I have no good way of knowing whether or not I missed a post or two since I last viewed the thread short of remembering how many posts are in each thread.

The ideal, I think, would be to have the link take you to the last page of the thread.

I agree that it would be very nice if the centerblock was more easily customizable on a per site/per user basis. On my site, I hacked it to show who was the last to post in the thread, because I felt it was important. I've been wanting to add a way to make the centerblock link to the last page of the post, but I haven't figured out a good way to do that, yet.

Random request: Is it possible to add an &page=last option to the urls for posts so that we can hardcode in an easy way to go to the last page?

Also, I have some comments/suggestions about the interface (I'm a big interface guy ). Currently, I don't find the interface to be very intuitive (at least here, with this theme). When looking at it, the function of the icon that takes you to the entire thread is not obvoius. Maybe it would be better to change the title so that it looks like this (using this thread as an example):

Extensions / Plugins / Forum upgrade Version 2.3

Thus, if you were looking at only a single post, you could click the thread title to go to the first page of the entire thread. This would also allow you to remove the Subject line above the Author Posts table, which feels cluttered.

I think you should dump the main Forum menubar (the one in dark gray, above). For one, I don't feel like Login and New Topic belong there. Login is more of a site function, not a forum function. And heck, it's in the sidebar, already. Also, New Topic isn't a forum-specific function like Home and Popular. I think it should be farther below, where it would feel more like a part of the current forum than the entire Forum portion of the website. The Popular, Home, and Members links are great, but they could be taken out of the menu and made less invasive as simple, small text links near the search bar, along with Show All New Posts and the like.

Also, the bar with the current location and the left/right arrows feels cluttered. I am a huge fan of the Smooth Blue interface from 2.2 RC1. That is a really nice, really intuitive, beautiful interface.

So, just my 2 cents. I've been considering donating for a while, now, but I am still waiting for the interface and centerblock to feel a little more clean. You've been doing a terrific job, though. Thanks for all you have given to the geeklog community.

- Tulkas

Sorry about that last post. Apparently, the forum didn't parse out my line breaks.

Anyway, one thing I forgot: I would like auto-redirects after posting to take you to the last page of the thread. I don't really want to go to the first page. I'd rather go to the last and see the post that I just submitted.

Thanks!

Tulkas - thanks for your feedback.

I'd like to suggest that it would help me if you did up a Photoshop mockup of your suggested UI.

A few points of clarification as I've been trying a number of UI changes - this version being one of them. Some ideas seem good until use them a bit.

Regarding the Subject and adding it to the forum/topic/subject as links or a breadcrumb style. I had it this way but the link with the subject was getting too long and then ran into the icon's on the right. It's fine until someone enters a longer subject or the forum name is longer. I can truncate these names as well but it still was not all that much room. Maybe moving the icons to a new row or elseware is needed.

I agree the top navbar as it is now, may no longer be needed but I think the plugin needs something at the top above the search. There are quite a few operations that need to be accessible and designed into the UI. These include:

• View all new posts
  
• Mark all as read
  
• New topic
  
• Post a reply
  
• Subscribe to this forum
  
• Next topic
  
• Previous topic
  
• Print this topic
  
• View Subscriptions
  
• View Popular Posts
  
• View Members that have posted
  
• Main forum index
  
• Forum topic index
  
• Google type navigation for pages 1....XX as needed
  

I prefer Icons or images to just links but agree, if they are not clear as to their purpose then they are not very useful. I find the name as a link for the operation can be lengthy and take up to much valuable UI space - but it will be clearer to its purpose.

I've been playing with using a Selectbox for some of the less used features/commands so they are out of the way but still very accessible.

I was trying to clean up or tighten up the UI by using the icons in this version. An objective with this version was to make the templates easier to theme and use of new CSS that now is less then 10 declarations.

Another objective was to improve performance. The previous release had a lot of images used to wrap the navbar and topics. This really showed down larger sites. So far in testing - this layout is an very noticeable improvement in speed.

If you are a designer, you may want to mock up as noted your ideas. We may also need better icons - all of which can be defined per theme.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com

What about doing what was in the old Smooth Blue layout (bread crumb format, I believe)? It was more like an outline, with forum section being above and slightly to the left of the forum name, and that slightly above and to the left of the current thread. I think that worked really nice, did not take too much space, and provided an easy way for the user to both visually see where they are, as well as navigate using the icons to the left of each line. My only suggestion, there, would be to make the text links, as well. That would allow people to type-find the links, plus it just makes sense from a UI perspective.

Actually, I find the smooth blue layout of 2.2RC1 to be much closer to perfection than the default UI seen here. Why stray from it?

Blaine, here's a lil "bug" i noticed. A quote inside of a quote. Doesn't seem to pick up properly...

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-- destr0yr
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

Yeh -- Don't do that . I've looked at this a couple of times and it won't be easy to solve. At least I don't have a good solution just yet.

I parse the quote tags from the top down and this confuses the logic. I would have to parse from the inside out - find the innermost one and expand.

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Geeklog components by PortalParts -- www.portalparts.com