Sooo the theme transition didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped. Certain bugs just refuse to pop up until they know you’ve gone live…
Feel free to point stuff out, just know that we’re actively working on it and we’re aware of quite a few quirks already.
Big thanks go out to @destroflyer@thetoucher and @eraslt for various tweaks and bug fixes, past and future. Anything that’s broken; I dun did it. Just gotta sleep now.
Update: Here’s the to-do list, as per your feedback and pre-existing plans.
Enhancements:
Support topics are no longer on-by-default for all troubleshooting posts.
@mentions should be accentuated (bold?), but not blue.
Userbrief/post separator (dotted line) should be made a straight line. See line under this thread title for reference.
Lacking jME identity: The monkey is here Other suggestions are welcome. I will not have another large-ass banner though. They add extra loading time and they’re very tricky to get right in responsive designs.
Iconsistent styling in front page top menu: I want the top menu gone.
More info on latest posts (author and last poster).
Replace toolbar (quick formatting) plugin with native bbPress/WordPress editor buttons
Bundle asset files for speed enhancements (option 1: Autoptimize for automagic, option 2: MinQueue for more control, option 3: Hand-made)
[Support request] and [Resolved] should be replaced by icons. (checked and exclamation for instance.)
Left-aligned avatars when full-width: This is something I’ve wanted too, but it’ll take some careful css sorcery.
DONE! Link color should be blue
DONE! Get monkey smileys back.
DONE! Revision log (post edits) should be properly aligned and less accentuated.
DONE! Quoted text should be smaller and more accentuated.
DONE! Reduce space between posts and reduce drop shadow.
Bugs:
- Search is borked: Need to cut down on the custom theming and make it more aligned with the default search pages.
- Any wiki page except the root is missing the side menu tie-in.
- Left hand menu pop-out is too sensitive, fades out too quickly.
- Strange issue on Ubuntu Chrome with quoted text bleeding outside of its div.
- DONE! (Update pending) Remove next-topic links like the "Welcome" button. (reported to theme author)
- DONE! For some reason @nehon and @icamefromspace avatar is not resized. Do you have locally uploaded avatars?
- DONE! ‘Mark topics read’ button is gone
- DONE! Downloads are acting up.
- DONE! Remove extra forum descriptions.
- DONE! (Update pending) Sticky topics listings have white background color.
You guys have done a great job of speeding the forums up, the latest-post page is not painfully slow to use anymore =) Still if you could bundle the asset files (javascript and stylesheets) together the site would be even more snappier.
About the design, I do think the community site lost a bit of its identity. Maybe the old site design looked a bit dated but I immediately knew which site I was on just from a quick glance. Consider bringing back some of the old color scheme.
jmonkeyengine.org, there is a styling bug with the top left menu on the landing page. It is not styled the same as on the subpages. The font is not the same and in smcaller viewports the menu text becomes white on light gray, which is hard to read.
Anyway, I appreciate all your efforts and I’m sure all will be unicorn and rainbows in the end =)
@kwando, I agree. I have similar concerns but some of the styling has not bled over yet. (We don’t even have a monkey head yet, for example.)
The new approach is to have the main pages be the flashy ones and the forum pages to be more laid back. I still think it lacks “branding” but I’m waiting to see.
I’m waiting for them to finish the migration before I offer any styling tips to hopefully bring back some branding so it feels like JME and not just “random yahoo forum”.
P.S.: 1000 kudos for the fact that all of the functionality seems to still be here. (Well, “search” could use some help but I’d mostly given up on search since the last upgrade so it’s not as big a part of my answer workflow as it used to be.)
The stuff I use on almost every post is still here.
The white is non-offensive at least! The only thing I really miss is a bit of info related to latest posts (haven’t checked individual forums yet, but I assume they are the same). Not being able to see who posted last to a thread… or who started it, etc is culture shock for me as those were the first two things (after thread title) that I looked for.
Why would I do this? Because it was fun to see a name and (depending on the name) guess what the post was going to contain. Heh… I’m 80% accurate (and growing) with certain people!
Like for instance:
If the name reads @pspeed …heh… you can slap me back for this whenever the post will read (by frequency):
“Your game-fu sucks, Don’t even attempt a networked game.”
“99.9% chance that your underlining design just gave me crotch-rot.”
“I don’t have time to run your test case.”
“Hey ass-hat, do you not speak JavaDoc?”
And my personal fav:
“I can count on one hand the number of people who’s code I would trust, and NONE OF THEM are here.”
Gimme back my names!!
EDIT: I hope you all know that I am kidding (well… I do try and guess… but I’m never right)
a) it seems wholly unnecessary in its current location.
b) in my sleep-deprived state, I just hit it instead of “Submit” and lost the post never to be seen again… no back button or anything. I guess my brain thought “Next ->” then was surprised to find itself on a welcome screen.
If it were recoverable then it would be one thing.
Edit: somehow the back button is there now when I hit the welcome but I swear it was not there before. And interesting that the button is not their for edit.
Also quoted text should not be bigger that posts’ text.
And the “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” check box shouldn’t be checked by default when answering
Latest post page looks quite ugly under firefox - there is are two bullet points next to icon and [support request] tags, so it takes 3 lines for each topic. Works ok under internet explorer.
One wish from me is to move the post-header information (the avatar, name, vote buttons) to the left side of the post when displaying on a large screen, this would lessen the amount of scrolling. Maybe even collapse posts so they are not in an individual bubble like now, since vertical space is precious nowadays with widescreen monitors…
As others have said before me, there needs to be some branding. While I like simplistic designs… I have to admit that I thought the theme broke and it got reverted to some default…
A nice jme banner at the top and maybe a couple more colorful accents in the theme (See: Google+; lots of white and gray, but colorful icons) and this is going to be great.
I think the old “pea green” (even though it was pea green) tied the whole site together. The nice thing about a borderline ugly color is that it’s distinct.
Other suggestions are welcome. I will not have another large-ass banner though. They add extra loading time and they’re very tricky to get right in responsive designs.
