Forum upgrade completed

This area is for the discussion of what's new, what's on your mind, and general photographic topics. A place to meet, make comments on this site, and get the latest community news.

Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau

elf
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by elf »

The new format is fine with just one tiny niggling little issue. Firefox doesn't show an icon on the tab.

rjlittlefield
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by rjlittlefield »

elf wrote:
Mon Jun 22, 2020 9:35 pm
The new format is fine with just one tiny niggling little issue. Firefox doesn't show an icon on the tab.
I assume you're talking about the tab in the browser tab bar.

As far as I know, nothing at photomacrography.net or photomacrography1.net has ever displayed a site-specific tab icon.

If you have some record that it did, then please send me an image so I know what it looks like.

--Rik

iconoclastica
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by iconoclastica »

It seems that the messages scale better to the width of the screen now. They look spacier and wrap well sofar.

If anything, the top matter takes up more than half the useful height of my screen (the forum contents or the individual posts). Especially the banner is higher than it needs be.
Apparently I already have forgotten how the previous version looked exactly... But comparing with microbehunter, which was laid out more or less the same, I see their top banner ends where here is the top of the text "photomacrography ~ amateurmicroscopy.net".
--- felix filicis ---

rjlittlefield
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by rjlittlefield »

Especially the banner is higher than it needs be.
Noted, thanks. I'll look at tightening that up.

Unfortunately a lot of the vertical space is required by buttons and links whose placement is determined by the board's "style".

In principle the style could be edited to place those anywhere, but in practice that level of customization is a bigger task than I have resources to tackle. (The style is determined by a total of over 5000 lines of HTML templates and corresponding CSS files.)

--Rik

elf
Posts: 1416
Joined: Sun Nov 18, 2007 12:10 pm

Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by elf »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Mon Jun 22, 2020 9:44 pm
elf wrote:
Mon Jun 22, 2020 9:35 pm
The new format is fine with just one tiny niggling little issue. Firefox doesn't show an icon on the tab.
I assume you're talking about the tab in the browser tab bar.

As far as I know, nothing at photomacrography.net or photomacrography1.net has ever displayed a site-specific tab icon.

If you have some record that it did, then please send me an image so I know what it looks like.

--Rik
I think it have have just had "photomacrography" as the text on the tab. Now it changes depending on the forum and the post. Guess which tab is Photomacrography:
Guess.JPG

Chris S.
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by Chris S. »

I still have a couple of PMN forum tabs open from before the changeover, and can see what Elf is pointing out. (Clearly, the tab titles have gotten reversed--they used to place the name of the forum first, with details of the tab next. Now this formation is display in reverse order--and often truncated. I'll post some details here.

The two tabs on the left are from before the changeover. The two on the right are of the same pages, but after the changeover.
Elf-1.JPG


Here the mouse is hovering over the first tab on the left, showing its entire title
Elf-2.jpg

Mouse hovering over second tab, showing its title
Elf-3.jpg

Mouse hovering over third tab, showing its title
Elf-4.jpg

Mouse hovering over fourth tab, showing its title
Elf-5.jpg

--Chris S.

Ichthyophthirius
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by Ichthyophthirius »

Hi,

Thank you for the Forum maintenance! I'm especially glad my old private messages survived the changeover.

Is there any way for the user to manage their own colour/shading sceme? It's a "gray mush" over here. I know white space is important to structure the pages, but 2/3 to 3/4 of the page is now just contextual information: headlines, user names and signatures which I think could do with more shading (just gray is OK, not necessarily colour) to let the actual contributions stand out more. Same for the "sticky" threads which don't stand out any more.

Regards, Ichty

iconoclastica
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by iconoclastica »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Tue Jun 23, 2020 12:41 pm
Especially the banner is higher than it needs be.
Noted, thanks. I'll look at tightening that up.

Unfortunately a lot of the vertical space is required by buttons and links whose placement is determined by the board's "style".

In principle the style could be edited to place those anywhere, but in practice that level of customization is a bigger task than I have resources to tackle. (The style is determined by a total of over 5000 lines of HTML templates and corresponding CSS files.)

--Rik
I have just been playing with my board preferences, especially the board style, something I have never noticed before (or it wasn't there in the old version). In User Control Panel | Board Preferences | Edit Global Settings, I can choose the style. I found it on "PMN Photoforum". Now I have settled for "AlanStyle SUBSILVER" which is more conservative with screen real estate. I don't know yet what else has changed though.
--- felix filicis ---

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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by rjlittlefield »

Ichthyophthirius wrote:
Wed Jun 24, 2020 2:19 am
Is there any way for the user to manage their own colour/shading sceme?
You can select from a limited set of installed styles. To do that, proceed as follows:
  1. In the menu that pulls down from your username at upper right of page, go to the User Control Panel.
  2. Click on the tab labeled "Board preferences".
  3. In the "Edit global settings" section, modify the selection at "My board style".
  4. Click the Submit button. For about 5 seconds you should see a reply that "Your board preferences have been updated", and then the page will repaint in the selected style.
Probably the AllenStyle-SUBSILVER selection is most similar to what we had before. It provided the icons that we're now now using in the default style "PMN-photoforum".

The style that I chose to start work from was we-universal, which is also in the list.

There is an extensive list of other styles at https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styles-2 . Anything labeled as compatible with 3.3.0 is probably simple for me to install without modifications. Anything not labeled as compatible with 3.3.0 is probably broken in some subtle way.

As far as I know, there is no mechanism for a user to tweak anything in any style by themselves. The forum software treats the styles as a protected part of itself, editable only by website administrators.

--Rik

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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by rjlittlefield »

iconoclastica wrote:
Wed Jun 24, 2020 1:28 pm
I have just been playing with my board preferences, especially the board style, something I have never noticed before (or it wasn't there in the old version)
The explanation is that I have just now installed a couple of additional styles, and flipped the switch that allows users to select their own style (after flipping several other switches that defaults all users to PMN-photoforum).

See my previous posting for more information.

--Rik

Ichthyophthirius
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by Ichthyophthirius »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Wed Jun 24, 2020 1:30 pm
You can select from a limited set of installed styles.
Thank you for the instructions, Rik!

Regards, Ichty

rjlittlefield
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by rjlittlefield »

elf wrote:
Mon Jun 22, 2020 9:35 pm
The new format is fine with just one tiny niggling little issue. Firefox doesn't show an icon on the tab.
OK, I've now added a favicon. The graphic is just a quick diagram of little-becomes-big. Maybe we can have a contest to make one that looks better.

You may have to do a hard reload in order to see it. (In Firefox, shift-click on the reload icon.)

--Rik

rjlittlefield
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Re: Forum upgrade completed

Post by rjlittlefield »

Chris S. wrote:
Wed Jun 24, 2020 1:55 am
Clearly, the tab titles have gotten reversed--they used to place the name of the forum first, with details of the tab next. Now this formation is display in reverse order--and often truncated.
Yes, pretty much reversed. As released, the tab title is determined by this HTML template, which is part of the "style".

<title><!-- IF UNREAD_NOTIFICATIONS_COUNT -->({UNREAD_NOTIFICATIONS_COUNT}) <!-- ENDIF --><!-- IF not S_VIEWTOPIC and not S_VIEWFORUM -->{SITENAME} - <!-- ENDIF --><!-- IF S_IN_MCP -->{L_MCP} - <!-- ELSEIF S_IN_UCP -->{L_UCP} - <!-- ENDIF -->{PAGE_TITLE}<!-- IF S_VIEWTOPIC or S_VIEWFORUM --> - {SITENAME}<!-- ENDIF --></title>

On first glance (and second, third...), this always strikes me as gobbledygook.

Translating to English:
  1. If the current user has any un-read notifications, then start with the count of those.
  2. If the page is not viewing a topic or a forum index, then put out the site name (www.photomacrography.net)
  3. The moderator control panel (MCP) has its own prefix, as does the user control panel (UCP).
  4. Then the page title.
  5. Finally, if the page is viewing a topic or a forum index, the site name appears last.
So, while I type this posting, the page title is "www.photomacrography.net - Post a reply", but if I'm viewing a topic it becomes "title of the topic I'm viewing - www.photomacrography.net".

--Rik

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Bugs in forum upgrade conversion

Post by rjlittlefield »

Just so you know, I have encountered a couple of bugs in the upgraded forum:
  1. In some old postings, non-ASCII characters such as "¿Qué tal estás?" rendered properly before the conversion but now appear scrambled. At this moment I have no idea why some and not others, or what to do about them. I do still have a copy of the old software and database, so in principle all the material is recoverable, but I have no idea whether that's practical.
  2. I was too optimistic when I thought that all saved URLs would still function properly. It turns out that there has been a slight change in the use of anchors, so that old format URLs that reference specific postings will no longer jump to the correct place on the page. (The change is that what used to be "#12345" is now "#p12345".) I have no idea yet what to do about that either.
--Rik

iconoclastica
Posts: 486
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Re: Bugs in forum upgrade conversion

Post by iconoclastica »

rjlittlefield wrote:
Fri Jun 26, 2020 9:12 pm
Just so you know, I have encountered a couple of bugs in the upgraded forum:
  1. I was too optimistic when I thought that all saved URLs would still function properly. It turns out that there has been a slight change in the use of anchors, so that old format URLs that reference specific postings will no longer jump to the correct place on the page. (The change is that what used to be "#12345" is now "#p12345".) I have no idea yet what to do about that either.
Do you have access to the database?

Wim--
--- felix filicis ---

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