One of the things I liked the best about the Spork boards was how simple the layout was where it was easy to read from one post to another. The design of this leaves a bit to be desired for the forum area (I like it for the regular site though).

Could we maybe lose the side bars for the search and categories and have the forum area go from edge to edge? Maybe put the search and google add at the bottom of the page? Or if you want to keep the search side bar just get rid of the categories one as they do not really relate to the forums area.

Also there area too many lines and separation between the reply's to a post.

Daniel

One of the nice things about the old place is its visual simplicity: instead of boxes within boxes and graphical icon widgets, it's black text on a white page. It's not a priority, of course, but if some of the "chartjunk" elements could eventually be designed out of these forums, I'd call it a win.

A tip along these lines: it is already possible to turn off the display of those "avatar" images, but the pref is hidden in a different spot from the other forum display settings: Control Center -> Options/Avatar -> Do not display avatars in postings

Roger,

I think I'm going to handle this by creating a special Spork Boards theme.

I've got a message in at the support forum because I think you are actually supposed to be able to set a user template preference when multiple templates are available. At the moment, there should be two in that list, which seems to be missing from the control center.

There is some visual clutter I hope to remove from the MacEdition forum template; I do think it's a bit too boxy. I'm probably going to handle this with color muting though.

I merged these two because they were similar.

I took out the right sidebar google search and replaced it with the forum search which was in the upper right of the center content column.

I've also removed the categories on the left and replaced them with a couple of links, including the link to the old spork boards.

It's getting better and better. I agree with D-Har and Roger - waaaay too many boxes. It's like I can feel every div in my bones. Especially between posts... it reduces the conversational tone. Mr. Ierna, tear down this {border: solid 1px} !

'nother suggestion. Do we need the subject, date registered, and # of posts repeated with each post? Maybe we could drop these (leaving just name, avatar, and date) and also take the subject editing box out of the post message window? Or do people want to have the ability to change the subject with each post?

edit: also, when the last line of a post goes all the way to the right, there's not much air between that line and the reply, etc, links just below it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/09/2007 03:45PM by Dr. Strangelove.

I was just about to make the same suggestion. The user info heading each post is too "heavy".

So. I made the lines way less dark, revamped the user heading, and removed the gap between each post.

How do you like it now?

(Posting from my regular user account, since admins and mods get different portions of the templates that normal users don't...)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/09/2007 07:17PM by tomi.

A lot better, once I hide avatars. Maybe even make the border between the user info and his post less distinct, so people don't get confused whether the user info belongs with the post above.

OK, I made the alt background color #f4f4f4, and removed the line at the top of the message body.

Looks better this way Tom, thanks.

There's another thing; the Subject above each post. That's quite redundant imho, is it possible to drop that one as well? (and while you're at it, could the post number and total number of posts be included a la WebX?)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/10/2007 03:54AM by tliet.

What about making the background for the user info the same as the message background?

tliet:

In WebX, the Subject would be redundant. In Phorum, you can have a unique subject per message regardless of the thread's subject. (See right above the post box, where it says "Re: Simplified Template/Layout" - you can change that if you want)

I know it seems redundant, but I didn't want to delete it because then people who use a different template might see different information than those using the Spork template.

Yes I am liking this a lot better, still think the left or right side navigation should go and just have that all merged into one putting the third google ad at the bottom of the page (which if you have a long topic would be where people would see it).

Daniel

Could the search box be shifted to the left hand side too? At the moment, I'm feeling that the posts are very cramped in the middle.

I'll be looking at the MacEdition template changes later this week.