Private Messages cleaned up big time

The Private messaging system has worked, but there have always been issues with the formatting of the list ( viewmessages ) and the actual PM ( viewmessage )

All of the formatting is now much cleaner and fits in line with their counterparts ( postlist, showflat ). We've lived with some pretty crappy formatting, that was never done right. It was sorta just thrown together as a quickie clone of forum, topic display, cut down.

Additionally, for the message list, you now can click on the last reply to go the the end.



The New private message is a form button and fits in with themes, versus an innocuous looking link that was hard to notice.


The unread by has now been pulled up into the button bar line, since i removed a lot of buttons that really had no use at all.



I've added the editor to the quick reply area now, so there is no need for 'switch to full reply' in a PM anymore either.

AJAX confirmations are also replacing the old 2 or 3 screen refresh mode that has been around forever.

User Preferences overhaul

User preferences have grown over the years into a mish mash of things, that an experienced user needs to know where to look to modify certain board options.

At least, for now, it is organized in sections ( fieldsets / legends ) and all the inline crap like hard wired <br /> are taken out and replaced with pure CSS ( geeks need apply only )

Most of the order stays the same, with maybe 4 items moving up or down into the proper section

1.


2.

3.


Additoinally, the preview skin/theme is a colorbox ( lightbox ) viewer scaled to your browser dimensions. Bye bye ShowChromeless ( not cross browser )

(click to see full size)

This is also laying the groundwork for future versions where we might switch to a tabbed / ajax interface.

The same idea will be applied to the user profile.

Additionally, editdisplay is now editprefs, since that is what it really is.

More gallery cleanup on aisle 3

Galleries never have been done right. There are too many things that were wrong with them to detail here, but they are getting a makeover

Another thing I've done now is to clean up the thumbnails. You can set thumbs to intelligently make a square thumb from any image, rather than rely on CSS to resize at browser time.

This is hard to explain, but might best be shown in some pictures below:

Below is a square thumb


Click on the image and you see a landscape full size


Thumbs fit nicely in rows / columns now


You can demo it ( as a guest ) Here to see it in action.

There is still more to do, but this was one pet peeve of mine.

I've also laid the groundwork for the CSS geeks to simply add some styling on the :hover for the thumbs to do effects like you can see Here

Subtle, but kinda nice too

Signature viewing options expanded

You can now choose to view sigs in private topics / threads ( or not ) or any combo.

It's a simple change, but an option that is no longer hard wired in PMs

User preferences


Admin modify user

Cleanup / bug fixes

Ubbthreads has long had a lot of waste in the display of various pages. The 'user_fields' were duplicated a lot of times unnecessarily, when user.inc.php would grab the field by default.

The admin section was most notorious for this as well.

Additionally, the cryptic 't1' and 't2' designations for user and user_profile tables were used instead of something more meaningful like maybe oh...... u and up ?

This has all been cleaned up and there are now a lot of pages that will run much more efficiently, because we aren't querying multiple columns, multiple times per page load.

Also, the hard wired __LINE__ and __FILE__ variables passed to the queries for error messages are all gone, because php has a function ( debug_backtrace ) that does this already.

Another thing that was done, was to use do_query, instead of do_placeholder_query where obvious. HUGE time saver here!

Bottom line: efficiency, cleanup were added while quite a few bugs were removed..

Bug: if no image library selected ( happens a lot ), galleries / captcha fail

We now have a fallback to using GD, if there is no library selected. Before, new owners would wonder WTF was wrong when they created a new gallery forum and 'nothing worked'

Invariably, it was found that they just needed to set a default.

This now acts a backstop for such cases

Feature: Cleanup of My Buddies + Adding of My Ignores

I've cleaned up the mybuddies functionality to be more efficient in general and along the way, noticed that we have never had an easy way to determine who we are ignoring.


Enter my 'Ignores' to the equation


I took the same code and parameterized it to use the same look and feel of the buddy list for the ignored users.

I also came to find out that the Ignored user list was a Kludge at best and never reflected users that had been deleted from the board. These users were carried around as dead weight and slowed down routines like showflat for example for no reason.

Now, when you click on the Ignores option, the code is self cleaning. In other words, it cleans out the dead and gone users from your list before presenting the list of currently / valid ones.

This might be a small thing, but it adds to your forum's efficiency in the long run.

User / Post ubb 'Like' feature

Thanks to 2 ubb members who paid for me to do it on their boards, this is now part of 7.6

Val @ German Shepherd Home and
Thomas @ Gramkofi

I have 7.6-ized this ( ajax mainly ) and now you have a feature where you can Like individual posts. These accrue to the person who made the post as well.



if you have already liked a post, the button is hidden, to prevent multiple likes


it shows on the left ( or top ) of the post for each user as the likes received


additionally, it shows in their profile as likes received and likes given


This feature can be turned on in the Control Panel just like the rating system.

Feature + Bugfixes: Calendar events

This is another part of UBB that needed some love. There were quite a few bugs that were cleaned up.

Just a couple were:

1. add event did censor, but edit event didn't
2. you could monkey with params to delete things you shouldn't be allowed to
3. add event had no real editor
4. no consistency across all forms ( edit, add, delete )
5. no preview on add
This has changed...

Add event has the proper markup panel. I also changed the pulldowns to radios for easier selection. the 'Type' is a hidden field if the user isn't allowed to edit Public events


All events take you back to the event list for the day you were editing, adding, deleting -- instead of the big calendar view. this makes more sense anyway.


Updating event gives status ( upper right ). Matter of fact all event actions have a status that is CSS style-able as well.


Consistency and cleaner code is the result here.. Another thing is that all calendar event operations go thru one place ( calendarevents.inc.php ) -- before it was strewn thru 6 different ones and they were all dissimilar in the way they handled things. This will make it easier to drop in a new editor in future versions ( can you say tinyMCE ? )

Bugfix (since 7.3): Emailing a gallery thread duplicated the gallery pictures for each reply as well

There was a typo in scripts/domailthread.inc.php

'attachments' was misspelled