Site upgrade

:scared:

I / we have the utmost faith in your endeavours and wish you a trouble free upgrade.

I'm just off to hide under the sofa until it's all over.

In truth I'm amazed that it will take this short a time and which must be a testimony to your diligence in planing, which we all know is the key to successful upgrades in this game, and of course a dozen backups of varying degrees to be on the ultimate safe side.

Good luck Tony, see you on the other side

Seconded absolutely! All MY IMPORTANT STUFF ...that actually does mean the whole forum of course

He gets a choice of 4 colours and what does he pick? :rolleyes:

But good luck from me too

Thanks for your support guy's.
I have it pretty well planned out and have run through it a couple of times locally.
The thing that scares me the most is the database changes especially completely changing the module used for access restrictions on the forum. Upgrading that requires rebuilding of the access permissions for pretty much every one of the thousands of nodes and takes quite some time.
The files are basically in place I just need to rename a couple of directories.

You will have to wait till tomorrow to see what colours are used.

Access restrictions module would be a cause for concern, wasn't that a problem last upgrade or perhaps I'm thinking of something else.

Anyways good luck, it will be fine, just make sure you have made an iso image of the internet in case you have to restore.

PMI!!! (Positive Mental Image ) Take the backups and just keep imagining it going smooooothly And we will too.

Ooh...secrets? I went to Twitter and thought that must've been it...can't wait.

We don't need an iso of the Internet, if it all fails we can fall back to google cache
The twitter colour is not the one used for the site, one less colour guess.

Time you were getting some shuteye then so as to be bright-eyed and busy-tailed for the 'morrow I see the forum's gone to banana-bender time too!

Well then I'll be pleasantly surprised then won't I

Woah! I thought I'd turned up at the wrong house and M.C. Esher was poking out of the window.

Very nice.

One comment, any chance of darkening the main text blue/aqua or making the background a very light grey. Its very bright

Put your sunnies on
Yeah we should be able to do something.
Just give me some time to work out a few other issues and I'll have a look at it.

Congratulations Tony! Very pleased things appear to have gone smoothly despite your trepidation

ummm...I'm thinking that was tongue in cheek right? I like the Blog page 'cos I can at least read the headings I've adjusted the light/dark and can barely read most of it!. I think the wine looks really good - odd pairing with turquoise to my mind, the designer did a great cherry red which could have also been used for the hover but I guess I'll get used to it

We'll give you a few days to settle before starting our list of New Forum Requests - who are your smiley friends Steve and Davie? And I don't mind this at all

I can't get to ALL recent posts?

I'm happy with the Wine, it good - stands out very well. The buttons at the top are good too (grey background). Its just the blue/white bit.

A couple of questions:

What are points?

Did some posts go missing?

The title in the squiggly brackets is good too

Smee, you should be able to access recent posts. It may be a cache issue. There may be more things I can blame on cache when I don't no the answer later.
I've implemented a pretty complicated cache system to try and speed up pages. If your the first visitor to a page after cache has been cleared it will be slow. After that cache should speed things up significantly. The cache works by treating content for users of the same role as the same content. Some pages can't be cached at all but in general my testing proved very positive results.

Points are awarded for helping out around the forum, like posting comments, marking the best reply or writing the best reply. Once we get some t-shirts designed I was thinking of providing prizes for people with highest points. I'll work out the details later.

I didnt see a site check thread?! anyways, here are my two-cents.

1. This could be the beer, but compared to the last design, everything seems very hard to read. I find myself straining my eyes to read.

2. I love the color scheme, however, its hard to scan and read. Needs more contrast. Seems the design needs more emphasis on breaking up the different blocks of text, or threads and link color needs more contrast. For example: these light bluish borders dont offer enough separation by-themselves. The "Post" pages are hard to understand for me. The border arent doing enough. If you keep the border color, it may need more vertical padding to add space. Line-height and font-size will also help scanning and readability. I'm sure Ed will have a hard time with this.

3. I miss my "who's online" in my "all recent posts" page. (

4. Wouldnt it be cool if those post columns were sortable? Probably too late for that.

5. 2px margin on the outer-most container seems a bit small. Should be, at-least, the 10px you have elsewhere.

6. Have you thought about adding the blue border on the container yet? I added 5px left and right, looked good to me. Helped separate the content from background a little.

Please keep the public stoning to a minimum, my bones are sensitive.

Ah, yes I can now...may have been me couldn't tell the difference :

I've just been investigating the points thing (and haven't looked to see if I've got any!) I thought it must've been the Best Reply count.

I would still like to see Location but THANK YOU for implementing Gary's suggestion of time-zone - it's particularly helpful when people are somewhere other than Oz or Blighty.

The online/offline circles would make more sense to me if they were reversed - dark for not and light for on.

YES, i see them !!! All hail Tony.

Keep the feedback coming.
I will most likely wait till tomorrow for most of the style changes. I'm past the point of thinking clearly and still have a fair bit to sort out.
The suggestions made so far are good.

Badges? what are they??

Badges are just to show what you think your good at. They show up on your profile page. Go to 'My Account' then you should see a my badges tab.
Normally they would be regulated by an admin or moderator but since that seems like too much hard work, I have made it self regulating.
I tried to add a bit of humor to it by adding drinks, coffee, beer etc for people who aren't to good at coding. we should add some sort of guideline like you have been using x for 2 years full time or something along those lines.

Currently there's no differentiation between a posts subject line, its body and the posters signature.

I had a quick look at some of the links you posted in web links and the buttons for the tags are overlapping when they wrap onto a second line.

It also seems that HTML posted as example code is now being parsed as real HTML and so not displaying as intended; an example is the first post in this thread.

Links could probably do with being a different, more contrasting colour too.

Actually, seems like the post subject lines have better contrast on blog posts than they do in regular posts.

Congrats Tony, for a major upgrade it appears to have gone very smoothly.

Off to have a root around.

Getting stronger though the the "stripes" don't work as well for the CSS Forums as they do for Recent Posts.

We're not getting automatic email notification either Tony.

My fault...again...hadn't enabled email in account settings :rolleyes:

The only thing I would suggest, and it might be a pain to do now, is I liked the old fluid layout better.
On my wide screen, it now seems like everything is all packed together.

On blog's the title is easy to spot, but on posts, the title blends in with the rest of the post.

That's about all i see right away. Good job none-the-less!!!

How are points actually awarded? Is it with the 'best reply' button? Who awards points? Is it the thread-starter or should mods be awarding points as we browse around the forum?

Just noticed that my points count seems to be incrementing each time I make a reply. So how is that any different from your post count (apart from the fact that the point count was initiated later)?

Points are awarded for 3 basic functions:

• posting topics and comments, web links or blogs,
• marking or writing the best reply
• and via affiliate links via Support us

For the Affiliate links to work correctly you need to have your website specified in your profile, then when someone clicks the link on your website you are awarded points.

It seems like Post Count isn't showing and that Points is actually showing up as +1 for every post I make.

1. On older posts, when it didn't matter, loose HTML with angle brackets were typed. I notice they're gone now (unless they were done in code tags, which so far, I think I like how those code-tag codes are showing up).

2. I also noticed that, when viewing a list of threads, usually the titles of the threads are the longest part of the row... the number of posts, and who posted when, is less text. So, can the titles be given a bit more room? Though they might just look smooshed on my machine because I've got Gnome.

3. With images off, the name of the site doesn't seem to show in the header anywhere. Can the logo's alt text also say "CSS creator" (right now it's "home")? Otherwise, if some other non-image text could say the name of the site in the header?

I have no problems reading the text (contrast) and the colours seem to go together fine.

Stomme poes, yes the input format changed slightly to accommodate the code highlighter. Code outside of code blocks will be stripped where previously they were escaped.
I'll check out the list of threads and titles and see what can be done.
Thanks for pointing out the logo alt I have fixed it locally and will upload the change later today.

Im not sure if i like the new nav background graphics to the left. It's just too much. Less is more. It messes up your clean quiet theme.

I agree with Cupid. It seems a little ornate. I would like to see that left side widened a bit, and the right side narrowed a lot.

cheers,

gary

Interesting, thanks for the feedback. I'll try it later without the background image. I really didn't like the look of the links in the left column before.

I agree, the default Drupal menu is basic and somewhat ugly and as an unstyled nested bulleted ul list never quite looks like a navigation menu.

It needs styling and the times I have worked with Drupal it's been a prime issue to deal with early on.

If you went the obvious route you would add a jQuery accordion script to it and that would improve things a little, failing that perhaps not show all the child links so 'My Account' stands alone and you simply access the parts on the actual page don't really need direct links?

For the moment you could simply do something like this below which would be an improvement on the original bulleted list until such time as something better can be found.

Is the default input set at 'escape HTML' if so that means adding images using toolbar doesn't work as img tags are stripped. Default input would be better set to 'filtered HTML' or img tag added to allowed tags for 'escape HTML'

Just to annoy this is how I felt the header looked better.

I'll add the image tag for now.
I like the menu style Hugo and just noticed it now after I uploaded some style changes.

I figured afterwards that adding the img tag would be better than changing default input.

I think you removed the menu anchor graphic as I was uploading thet SC, I think the salient point is to separate the top level ul li elements so there are distinct groups. I find that there are too many items to scan down with comfort as one continuous list in groups it's easier to focus on the section you want.

Thanks Hugo,
It's looking better all the time. Amazing what you can do with a little CSS

Yeah it's rather neat CSS, I'm quite a fan

Ok I'm on a roll now,

What we'll do is, once the left menu is correct (in observance of graceful degradation), and in order to grab as much real estate as possible, using jQuery we'll by default slide the sidebar-left for tracker off screen. Place a button to the left of 'recent posts' something like 'menu options' with a onclick that will slide the sidebar back into position; center content and right sidebar are fluid to take up the space made available and retract when the sidebar comes back into place. Likely majority of the time we don't use the left menu items or at least not that frequently?

Well it's easy to say especially when one doesn't have to do the work

I did the reverse approach for a rather busy admin where we provided the user the option to slide the sidebar off screen allowing a better view of the important information and form fields/tables

Hugo I'm not afraid of a little jQuery and very nearly implemented the wider layout using jQuery instead of CSS

If I was going to implement the sliding sidebar for the tracker page, I would set a cookie or session variable to remember the users choice. Although I like doing this sort of thing, usually it is under used and doesn't justify the work and testing required to get it working.
You've got me thinking too much now, luckily I have to step away from the computer for a while and do some shopping.

Shopping, always a great excuse . I hear what you are saying though about under use and time spent implementing, it's an issue I have to deal with day in day out, too many requests for things that take a good morning or more to implement and are little used versus a to do list that makes me cry.

Hmm could hack my script and pass it over might save a bit of time although testing is nearly always the bigger time soaker and the actual functioning script isn't that complicated to cobble together and your javaScript skills are greater than mine,

I think the tops of the three columns need to line up better. Either the line above New Forum Topics or the one below it in the right col need to line up with the top of the links in the left column. And the top of the table in the centre column should line up with those too. So the heading and the two buttons underneath it would move up into the white space below the main nav.

Good suggestion Tyssen.
I had thought of it before, just didn't give it enough priority.
I'll try and get it sorted later today.

Still more "pale and interesting" than I had anticipated The left is looking much better me thinks although I always thought the forums menu would be a (form?) dropdown selection.

Is this slider menu of any use? I bookmarked it sometime ago. Unfortunately where the first line says it works without js, it didn't for me on mac/ff3

PS - you could nick that great green while you're there