bospress.net
www.bospress.net
mjp,
How long did the update take? it looks like it went quickly.
Bill
How long did the update take? it looks like it went quickly.
Bill
Plunging headlong into eternal darkness, aka: forum update
- Thread starter mjp
- Start date
mjp
Founding member
The fonts should all be the same size. What's bigger?
The icons may or may not be reworked (and some made smaller). But the longer I run this forum software, the less I'm inclined to customize it, because every customization is a future headache.
About 60 hours before yesterday, and 2.5 hours yesterday. Yesterday would have been faster but my upload/download speeds were shit all night.
If 60 hours sounds like an exaggeration, Imagine you've been typing away happily on DOS or in notepad for years and then someone drops the latest MS Office or Open Office in your lap and says, "Here's how you're going to do everything now. Have fun." The forum layout tools are that different. The management side, configuring the forums, dealing with users - all the nuts and bolts stuff - that hasn't really changed. But everything else has.
I think it kind of sucks too Roni, but it's as close to the old layout as I could make it. Like the other thread says, there is still a lot of tweaking to do. I could have stuck with the old version, a lot of people are, but we would have eventually been left behind, and you know how fast everything moves now. It doesn't take long for this kind of stuff to really show its age.
mjp
Founding member
I am incensed and appalled, and for the record, I would have poured, but I have an affliction that affects my pouring hand. How dare you!
justine
stop the penistry
funny you should mention the smurfs, since we thought they were lost! i left them at my parents' house when i moved here, and i was going to bring them back from our visit there in may but nobody could find them. of course they were discovered after we left.
of course you had to change things some day and of course you did a splendid job in letting it look as close to the original as poss!
It's just ... new, you know.
I dunno. It just SEEMS to be bigger.
At least some of the symbols Are.
I have a sick habbit of opening my IE-window full size even though I have a 17"wide-screen-notebook. Maybe that's the cause.
At least the field in which I'm typing now goes from left-end to right-end now and is not a centered 'box' with a FIX size anymore. And since the menu to the left is gone, the WHOLE thing looks much wider now. Also the empty spaces between symbols, fields etc seem unusual big to me. All the boxes seem bigger. I guess it's just my gut feeling because I was so overwhelmed when I first saw it. Unfortunately I don't think I have a screenshot of the older layout to make a valid direct comparison.
Aww, just forget about my stupid complaints, baby. You do a more than fine job here!
You know that.
It's just ... new, you know.
I dunno. It just SEEMS to be bigger.
At least some of the symbols Are.
I have a sick habbit of opening my IE-window full size even though I have a 17"wide-screen-notebook. Maybe that's the cause.
At least the field in which I'm typing now goes from left-end to right-end now and is not a centered 'box' with a FIX size anymore. And since the menu to the left is gone, the WHOLE thing looks much wider now. Also the empty spaces between symbols, fields etc seem unusual big to me. All the boxes seem bigger. I guess it's just my gut feeling because I was so overwhelmed when I first saw it. Unfortunately I don't think I have a screenshot of the older layout to make a valid direct comparison.
Aww, just forget about my stupid complaints, baby. You do a more than fine job here!
You know that.
Gerard K H Love
Appreciate your friends
I think I will grow to love this new format. Great idea to do this now.
mjp
Founding member
The width can be static - meaning it won't expand out to the edges even in a big browser window - but doing that creates problems with the left side navigation on the main and forum list pages. When you move that navigation away from the edge of the browser it looks all fucked up. It isn't designed to float in the left third of the page.
A lot of the changes they made to the forum software were to bring the code more in line with modern standards. So they got rid of things like tables, which were never intended to be a page formatting tool but became one because back in the day we had no other ways to control columns. Anyway, the old table layout is what made it so easy to insert the navigation and control every aspect of the layout. The new CSS standards are much more slippery, and add to that the fact that some browsers (okay, only that festering piece of shit IE) have a different idea of what the CSS standards are, and you've got headaches.
I can do CSS from scratch, and I could edit some of the forum files to make it obey me, but the forum has a back-end interface that gives you pretty extensive control without editing any files. Editing the files introduces a whole other level of headaches that I would prefer to avoid. So I'm stuck with what can be done through the interface, and trying to keep some design elements intact so the forum more or less blends in with the rest of the site. That meant a lot of compromises, and the inability to make it really match the old layout. It would have been a lot easier to leave the layout as it is by default and just change the dull blue colors to gray. But that really looked shitty to me, so here we are. Somewhere in the middle.
But a year from now I doubt any of these changes will have mattered much. It's just a matter of getting used to it. You know, right before they change it again.
And I'll continue to make little changes here and there over time. I was always changing little things in the other forum, but you probably didn't even notice most of them. The point is it took a while to get the old one "perfected," and it will take a while to make this into something as well.
Yeah, I've heared about such things as "modern standards". Somewhere.
If you look at the 2010-version of the Bukowski-Society-Site, you will see, that I still use Tables. I don't know shit about css or other things. (Well, I 'know' about them, but haven't learned to handle 'em.)
At least I gave up the even more out-of-date 'frame'-structure that we had before the update.
Less than a year.
One always gets used to it.
It's like living in a dictatorship. THEY say, what will come next and you'll have to swallow it or die. I even got used to the goddamn latest MS-Office and now they come up with a new one. And I will get to cope with that one too. But I will never understand it. In the old days, it was possible (and made sense) to UNDERSTAND a program. These days are gone.
</RANT>
mjp
Founding member
Ha. Well modern doesn't always mean better, fo sho'!
