This thread is for features currently implemented and DEFINITELY included in what will be 7.6 release.

I was ambiguous with my original post where that was looking more like a wish list of what we wanted to go into 7.6.

EVERYTHING posted in this thread has been completed ( except where i note 'ongoing' ) and will be included in the upcoming release.

This will take some time, but i will start running down the list as i compare all the changes versus the stock 7.5.6 release or add a new feature going forward.

It has been a long time coming and i apologize for the delay in update.

Discuss this thread Here

Feature: Admin - Quick add new user

Member Management now has another tab


Allows an admin to quickly add a new user.



Upon adding them, an email is sent with username and password for them to login with instructions.

( note: i will add a check box to force rules accept on 1st visit ) ; ty @ gliderdad

Feature: Change mood via Lightbox



Now uses a lightbox ( prettyphoto ) to change the user's mood ( ajax / jquery driven )

This is all brought into one template file ( changemood.tpl ) and one script file ( changemood.inc.php )

dochangemood.inc.php is now obsolete

Feature: Shout box ignored user is truly ignored

If you are ignoring a user, you will not see any of their shouts at all. They just never happened as far as you see.

Feature: Mark all read for a specific forum ( double click method )

Now will affect the sub-forums as well ( 1 deep ). Before, it would only affect the top level.

Feature: Forum list ( postlist.inc.php, postlist.tpl ) - now has sticky and announcement css classes

This is only for those forum owners who want to differentiate their announcements and sticky rows.

There are two new classes: sticky_css and announce_css that can be styled as the theme developer sees fit.

Example where this has already been in use ( simhq.com ) below:



If you choose to ignore these classes, there will be no affect on any current theme.

Feature: Show profile - orders the buddy list alphabetically and colorizes names

file: scripts/showprofile.inc.php

Feature: New file - templates/default/navigation.tpl

Stripped out the top navigation from the header.tpl file and placed in its own file. This is the 1st move to make this file more dynamic in future releases.

Additionally, this serves to make the editing of the header.tpl file more easy and readable.

Modularization is the goal.

Feature - report real IP, if it is masked by a local proxy

nginx is a great addition that is very scalable. much more so than apache. it acts as a local proxy to apache and is much more able to handle huge loads.

the problem is that it masks the user's true IP.

ubbthreads will now automatically detect this and report the user's REAL IP, rather than the localhost ( 127.0.0.1 )

Ongoing: Tons of new css classes added for flexible styling

There are too many to list here, but for any theme developer, they will find much more flexibility to make new styles that break out of the 'ubbthreads' look / feel.

Additionally, to maintain backward compatibility with existing themes, common.css has been broken into 2 files.

reset.css ( new ) -- included before any styles to ensure all the markup that was taken out of the html side of things, doesn't break existing widths / margins / cell spacing etc.
common.css -- included after all styles to apply any common to all additions.

There will be more details on this later.

Ongoing: Effort to completely remove all inline styles from all templates

This was/is a HUGE effort and is needed to move forward to separating out the styling (css) from the markup ( html, tpls )

Inline styling such as



becomes


Classes .ae-left and .ae-right are in reset.css for backward compatibility, but can now be changed in the current style to be any value desired without editing template files.

We also have cleaned up the actual markup to add indentation ( tabs ) to make the markup more readable.

If possibe, every .tpl file will be modified to strip out inline styling. .tmpl files are a different story and since they are admin, probably won't be cleaned up.

We might leverage the work that Rick did on the admin back end instead. ( tbd )

Feature: Allow image in a reply to a gallery forum post

Since there are new permissions ( discussed later ) that allow / disallow images on a per user group basis, there is no reason to disallow images outright in gallery replies.

It is now allowed ( permissions based )

Feature: Shoutbox smileys popup ( lightbox )



A new button for the shoutbox "Smileys" has been added and when clicked a lightbox ( prettyPhoto ) popup appears:



Clicking the smiley ( graemlin ) images automatically inserts them into the shoutbox text input.

This is a feature that has been around for quite some time and I blogged about it Here @ sirdude.com

There is a slight difference in 7.6 implementation vs the Blog post. Mainly the javascript library used, due to GPL licensing issues. Other than that, it is identical and proven to work.

Bug fix: /admin/login.php

Now display both pending display name changes and users waiting approval.

As it was before, if there were users requesting a display name change, the approval queue was ignored.

Bug fix: /ubb_js/standard_text_editor.js

Didn't allow for a menu object to be Null, causing a possible javascript error.

Obsolete: /ubb_js/prettify.js

Never used -- removed from standard installer

Obsolete: libs/the_end_of_all_libs.inc.php is now obsolete

should have been a long time ago. it never served its intended purpose.

Bug fix: Showprofile

Showprofile could possibly hang for a long time ( apache / php timeout -- usually 30 seconds ) because of a glitch in the way the default blank avatar was read from disk.

This was due to the order of certain lines of code execution. This is now fixed to NOT have a long wait.

Feature - smarty library updated to latest 2.x release ( 2.6.26 )

Ideally, it would be nice to go to a non-smarty solution in the long run ( speed / efficiency ), but for now it makes sense to use the latest, hardened release of the 2.x branch.

We can't go to smart 3.x, because of the restriction that we support php v4.x for now

Bugfix: Edit wrappers limit

Editing wrappers had an unintentional hard limit to the number of wrappers allowed. This affected both the editing of existing wrappers as well as the creation of NEW wrappers.

Note: new wrappers never worked right at all.

This is now fixed

Feature: Gallery - lightbox ( prettyPhoto ) enhancement

Clicking on thumbnails has always been an archaic kind of process when multiple images are involved.



The new method for single and multiple images uses a lightbox effect



You can see there are multiple ways to navigate the thumbs to see full size representations by the above image.

You can also just click the slideshow button and it will cycle thru all the thumbs. Pause at will.

This is standard fare for most gallery interfaces nowadays and this is why it has been brought into 7.6

Go Here for a live demo - Click on "Image Gallery" - Demo, but it is pretty standard

Feature: User selectable topic Tooltip preference



Tooltips have long been a bone of contention with UBB, because it was either an all or nothing setting that the admin decided upon. Invariably, there is enough grumbling against it to warrant the feature being switched off for the entire forum.

Users never had a choice in the matter to enable it, if so.

Enter, the user selectable option


Now, it makes logical sense for the Admin to enable it in the control panel as before:



.. and then allow users to turn it off, if they don't want the feature.

This is now added to 7.6 ( thanks Ruben for advocating it ) and was inspired by a MOD that I did awhile ago for just this case. Shown here

Note: this is a new user profile field and NOT a hijaack of one of the five extra fields that the mod did :2c:

Feature: Mark all posts read, Mark forum read

The 'Mark all Read' has been brought into the new 'My Stuff' menu for starters. No longer in the footer.

It is also a dialog box shown below:


When the user presses the "Submit" button, all posts are marked read ( as before ), but it is done in a more AJAX'ie way than before.



The message informs the user of activity then fades away when done. The dialog box also fades out of view.

Also, there were multiple scripts involved ( markread.inc.php, markallread.inc.php and domarkallread.inc.php )

These have all been brought into one file now ( markread.inc.php ) which handles all three entry points for the code.

There is only 1 language file and only 1 template too.

This is the general case where, if possible I'm combining disparate functionality into 1 file with conditional branching, setting the stage for easier modifications in the future.

Note: this is a preview of the general direction of the UI. namely modal / dialog boxes that are AJAX driven when possible to not force full screen refreshes for mundane tasks

Example of another one to follow will be the Login process

Feature: jQuery 1.7 via google cdn, with local fallback

The main foundation of the javascript will be via jQuery. This is the defacto most popular / robust library going to date ( imho )

To save time and speed things up, the footer.tpl ( note: javascript is loaded at the bottom for speed now ) 1st tries to load jquery from Google's CDN ( fast ), if not possible, a local copy is loaded.


Much, if not all of the current ubb javascript will be eclipsed and thrown away as we subsume it with jQuery plugins and raw code.

It just makes sense to be using cross browser compatible javascript going forward.

Bugfix: Inline moderation ( gallery ) - Select / Deselect all

I don't know if this EVER worked right since 7.3, but I have now fixed inline moderation for Gallery forums to do what it was advertising in the 1st place.

Feature: Cookies

Fixed numerous issues with cookie handling. One example is that the Collapsed forum category cookie was blatantly disregarding the board "Cookie Prefix" setting. Many other small issues as well.

Selecting Cookies is still located in the "My Stuff" menu ( note: the My Stuff will be redesigned and posted about later ) as before:


Now, instead of painting a full screen with header / footer, the Cookie clearing template loads as a dialog box ( much like mark all read does ), as shown below:



Cookies are listed and when the form is submitted, the status message appears and fades out. The user is then redirected back to the forum default listing and is logged out.

One additional cosmetic issue ( bug ) has also been fixed. The cookie value, in the past had a tendency to overflow their container and make the display whacked out horizontally. With the proper use of CSS ( word-wrap:break-word; ), this is no longer an issue

FAQ ( phase 1 for 7.6 ) redone

The FAQ has long been a source of useful information for new users of UBB Threads, however it has been a nightmare for novice board owners to both modify and add to.

Step one for 7.6 has been to make the faq.tpl file much more readable and easy to understand. You now have the option of editing right in the template and adding new FAQ entries, since the template is simple.

Example of a FAQ entry in faq.tpl is:



( compare it to how ugly the code was before and you will appreciate the simplicity )

the only thing to do is to modify the 'Question' and it's 'Answer'.

Gone are the id="expandy-0" etc and having to know to add it to the initialization script. As a board admin, you had to know javascript to do anything meaninful in the FAQ section, but not anymore.

If you simply copy/paste the template, the jQuery will automatically pick up on a new FAQ entry and hook it into the system.

Additionally, I've added quite a few CSS classes that can enhance the look and feel of each FAQ entry. Before, we were relegated to 'tdheader' and 'alt-1' with no flexibility.

new CSS classes are: faq-hdr, faq-body. If you don't use them, the FAQ will look as it has always looked.

I've also added the toggle_open.gif and toggle_closed.gif images, instead of the [+] and [-] hardwired text.

Additionally, you aren't forced to click on the image, but instead you can click anywhere on the Question row to toggle open/closed the Answer content.

Example of my dark red theme below:

Cursor is a pointer anywhere along the row


When clicked, a jQuery .slide() effect is used to smoothly slide out the hidden content



--- Phase 2: for 7.7+ --

I intend to suck all these language strings into the DB and have an Admin Cpanel FAQ editor to make it even easier...

Feature: Show members adds dynamic ( AJAX ) search

The original input text that searches for names containing has been replaced with one that fetches member names as you type ( autosuggest ):


As you type, the list grows / shrinks with the available matches


Selecting a member from the drop down, reveals 4 quick links as shown below:



View Profile, Send a PM, View Posts and View Topics

This idea will also be applied to the Add member to PM search as well and I will post when it is complete.

Feature: Cleaner login system

In addition to cleaning up the cookie handling ( usually affects IE more than others ), the login process involves much less screen refreshes and replaces it with AJAX.

if you log out


there is a tab in the upper right ( is also an obvious nag to register ) that when clicked on


slides down a login / register overlay. upon logging, in the tab disappears and you are directed to a normal forum experience


you can also start the registration process by picking a username or email address and 'Register' to fill out the other items a normal registration process entails.


additionally, the login process takes your email address ( real email address in profile ) or username.

so only 1 refresh after login is required, instead of 2 or even 3 as it was before.

Reduced screen refreshes, using more AJAX
( note: i previewed this 2 posts above, but refined the interaction a bit, hence the rehash / new screenies )

I'll give you one example, the just list the areas where AJAX is now used.

The pictorial example is 'Mark all read'


When clicked a dialog box fades in with the familiar verbiage


Upon clicking, the AJAX kicks in and does the marking all read


And a graceful fading out return ( ala Facebook style, where you don't have to wait, but can click to speed up the return ) to exactly where you were before the operation.

In the past, you were forced to 3 refreshes: 1. initial screen 2. click, then see status screen 3. redirect to main forum list, regardless of where you were

This idea now also applies to:

• My Cookies
• Adding / Removing watched Users
• Adding / Removing watched Forums
• Adding / Removing watched Topics
• .... and much more

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

Feature: Drop the xx seconds from relative times

UBB never had resolution down to seconds anyway, so it was always a bogus value to display.

Relative times now display 'xx Minutes ago' and no seconds.

When the time is less than 1 minute, the wordlet 'A Moment ago' is now displayed

This reduces a small amount of unneeded overhead and less display space too.

Feature: Remove all the copyright baggage from each file and put into ONE copyright.txt in ubb root

We've carried around a huge copyright header in every script file that was unneeded to maintain proper copyright info.

Additionally, whenever things changed, all those headers had to be modified.

Now, the copyright is in one file and covers all files underneath ( excluding the add on libraries -- those are mentioned as well however )

For modders, this was a HUGE pain in the ass when running compares.

Now, the headers are short, sweet and even more meaningful ( ie: i give you a blurb on WTF the file does! )

Every script and lib file has a consistent header like:



Templates are also consistent like:



CSS like so:



and Javascript files as well...



Now, with this consistent structure, it will also be possible to add automation to updates and file comparisons in the future... ( can you say more automated upgrades? -- maybe )

All in all, this just cleans up the code and makes it a better foundation for moving forward

Feature - cleaned up Mailing of Topics and Private Topics

In addition to the aforementioned bug with Emailing a gallery post, I overhauled the topic mailing system in general.

Removed lots of dead code.

Properly use SITE permission, instead of hardwired ( legacy ) $config value.

After mailing a topic, you are now redirected to exactly where you began. Before, it was hit and miss.

All this is merged into one file, instead of 2 for the equivalent file size that is half of the 2 combined.

Feature / cleanup - Notify Moderator on post

This has had bugs all along, where it notified too many people of an offensive post.

notifymod.inc.php is cleaned up to only notify:

1. moderators in the particular forum
2. admins / global mods who have it enabled in their profile to receive notifies

Redundant code has been merged ( [i][/i]donotifymod.inc.php is obsolete ).
Dead code has been removed.
Bugs fixed.

Obsolete templates, never used

modifypost_stickpost.tpl
modifypost_unstickpost.tpl

Feature: Portal enhancement

The Portal has really never gotten any love at all. The middle column was perty much fixed with only 1 option: what forums to grab 'news posts' from.

That was it

Until now!

I added a Middle column option in the portal layout:



If any islands are selected, they will be shown before any news items. This allows for an endless number of ways to feed content to the middle column.

Example below, is just my grabbing the "Nivo Slider" jQuery plugin and slamming it in a custom island.


With custom islands, you can pull in Rss feeds, Popular topics, have a wide shoutbox only on the portal...

Really, the possibilities are endless..

There is much more to do in future versions, but it makes sense to at least give this little bit of love to the current portal page for now..



Check out the demo of a quickie nivo slider Here

Feature: Forum Display options

These have always been a little used and kinda added clutter to the bottom of the forum display.

The form was perty ugly and wasn't even put on 1 line to save vertical space, at least.



Well, now it is added as a tab / hidden div that slides out upon click.

Here is the tab, sitting under the last post in the forum list.


Clicking on it, reveals the form, to change your prefs, like it always did.


Clicking on the tab again, hides it, or you can click 'Change' and preferences will be changed _AND_ it will be hidden on auto refresh.

Feature(s) - Editpost, approvepost, deletepost

The code for these 3 functions were spread out over too many files to reliably manage. I've now made all the editors and positions of the buttons consistent.

A ton of code cleanup was done ( cleaned out a ton of obsolete code ). Security holes were fixed and common functions ( validation / permissioning ) were used to ensure consistency and non-corrupt databases.

The number of things that could potentially go wrong are too long to list here, but we now have a more solid foundation.

To take just edit post for an example: the total code size in 756 was 29K.. now with the combined / cleaner code, it is 17K and does fewer unnecessary queries as well.

Smaller things, like LOCKING THE TOPIC that is about to be deleted have also been added. Before, there was a chance that a use could be replying to a topic that was about to go gonzo and produce a post that was an orphan.

( the same idea / cleanup has been applied to deleting a user -- 756 leaves stray unhooked PMs from users -- spammers -- who get deleted ) This happens on this forum all the time and is very annoying!

Anyway, for many forums, there is a desire to only make the topic subject be the subject for all replies after that. Some people change the subject and especially in flat mode, it makes no sense at all.

There is now a way to configure the board to disallow this:


When a user edits any reply, they just see the subject and cannot change it.


All of the save buttons go thru a common fadeout message as well..


I really should post another 10 screens here to show all the possibilities, but this should just be considered a template for all editors now with the buttons right below the editor.

Additionally all templates are chock full of CSS goodness for the stylers to go crazy with..

Feature: editor text area, autogrow

In the past, we had the two up / down buttons to grow/shrink the text area for the editor:



This is not needed anymore, since the text area autogrows as needed.


the buttons are removed to also clean up the markup bar.



The above picture is hard to show what it does, but as you approach the end of the editor and need more lines, the jQuery plugin will increase the height as needed.

It also won't interfere with any browsers who have the handle enabled ( firefox, chrome etc ), but just be an extra along for the ride.

-- This is all part of the editor cleanup / standardization --

Captcha preview in Admin cpanel

This has always been lacking, since an admin should at least see if captcha works and which one to use has a preview



Additionally the ImageMagick code had bugs in it that has now been cleaned up.

All code has been merged into one file, since the lib directory file was only used by 1 file. Dunno, why that was ever done.

The angles used to distort the letters were also relaxed a bit from some of the extremes that were in there before. This still maintains needing a human to decipher, but at least gives the poor bashtids a chance to even read the letters

Additionally ( i think i already mentioned before ), there is a fallback to GD, as default, if nothing is initialized.

Feature: do what forum permissions say you can do

Specifically for gallery forums.

If polls are allowed in replies ( by group, forum ), then allow a poll.
If polls are allowed in topics ( by group, forum ), then allow a poll in the topic.

Don't prevent images in replies to galleries, if the IMG tag is enabled. No reason not to.

Selecting a reply icon is allowed. why prevent it?

Essentially, all but the 1st POST in a gallery topic is treated special. IE: uploading attachments as gallery images.

Otherwise, it is regular from that point on.

Additionally, there is no need to have a special template for the replies to a gallery. I now share the common template that showflat uses for the replies.

Feature - Approve topics option added where needed

In the past, it has been cumbersome, to say the least to approve topics from withing a forum, without having to go to the Admin control panel or use inline moderation.

Even with inline moderation, you never got to read the post 1st, then decide, without having to hit the back button etc etc.

Bottom line: too many clicks required, for something that can be made easier.

Enter: 'Approve Topic' from the manage topic


Clicking on manage topic now yields the option


You can also edit the topic as before......


...., but the moderator options are brought up into the same line with the other ones.


Thanks to Ruben for mentioning this...

Feature - moved the welcome stuff on breadcrumb bar to it's own place

The welcome area, where you see 'Welcome SD' and change mood and logout has been moved to it's own area.

It does a tag team with the Login Tab ( mentioned earlier in this thread )

See below for ubb stock ( no changes to style ) look:



When you are logged out, the standard login/register tab appears as before ( picture below shows the slider in the down position ):



The 'My Stuff' menu has been moved over there as well, including the notifications ( PM indicator )

Picture below for sd-dark_doom theme:

A huge effort has gone into rewriting the look / feel of what i'd call the 'search results group'. This group consists of:

• Active topics, posts, unanswered
• Watched forums, topics, users
• Search results
• User Posts, Topics

They all share a common template now, so we will see consistency going forward
Five columns ( 1 optional is the left most one, depending )



Based upon how you have your preferences set, you will see a preview under the topic subject or on hover.

Also, the various sub-options are now tabs, which make it more intuitive. shown below are the three active ( topics, posts, unanswered ) tabs






Also, below each set of results are the buttons and pagination. Before they were all over the place and your guess was as good as mine as to where they were and why.



You can select how you want to see your preview.

1. nothing at all 2. inline underneath 3. on hover over the subject ( after a delay now )



When you hover, a tooltip is shown with a short delay. The tooltip tracks the mouse and goes away when not hovering.

This tooltip is much more friendly ( optional, btw ) then the one i originally coded up for 7.3




Tooltips can be up to 8 different styles and the admin can select what color / look, they desire to be tied to each style ( colors, light, dark etc )




You additionally have a class ( new ) called tooltip-extra, that allows you the admin / css god to override the base styles and roll your own for each style.

So there are no limits, except for knowing CSS




I've also removed popup_content_header and popup_content, since they aren't needed anymore in the style.



They won't hurt anything, if they are in your style, but will be removed after the 1st time you edit.

No harm, no foul..

I will be updating with another 5 posts, things that i've already done, but have no time to screenie / document / post it here..

so, just know that there are 5 more things, already done, that will be posted in the coming days..

As a follow on to the previous post, this is for Geeks, so if you aren't real technical, it'll fly over your head.

Just nod and act like you get it

Anyway, the way tooltips were done in the past violated W3C, because I hijaacked the title attribute of the anchor tag ( <a href="..." title="hijaacked preview goes here" .. )

This was doubly bad, because it added a huge amount of page weight to send stuff that is initially hidden from view.

Until now...............

Now, i load the tooltip structure hidden below in divs, but don't fill in the content at all. It is just a shell or 'scaffolding' per se.

When the user hovers and shows 'intent' ( delay over target ).... an AJAX request is made to automajically fill in the scaffolding for that tooltip alone.

I puts it into the hidden div and then displays it, when the delay times out.

It also caches the result, so there is no double / triple call for the same tag.

This saves time / resources and bandwidth and is the way it should have been done along...

My bad

Another Geek post, with no pictures.

I seriously overhauled the user class, to abstract the database fields into the object.

What was there before was a mixture of an array ( $user ) and an object ( $userob ).

For a newbie developer, this wasn't very obvious to deal with.

Regardless, the other thing that has always been lacking is abstraction.

There were certain hard coded ways Rick did things and you had to know how the DB was setup.

Now, you don't....

Before you had to do something like:



All well and good for those in the know, but it really made it so there were only 2 or 3 peeps who 'got it'. And if i showed you how a Mod or globalMod was determined, it is even more obscure with a preg_match..

Now, the code is simply:



You don't care what the DB value is, because the user class shields you from the DB layer..

This is just one example of about 30 or more things that were changed to make it easier for both the developer ( modder, plugin maker ) as well as efficient code execution

Additionally, all fields in the DB that should have had a default value for the user profile in particular, now DO!

I don't know how many times i see stupid code where we have to wonder if a database value is set and take the configuration value if it isn't, when it would have been much simpler to have a default.

Like posts per topic or topics per page for example...

DB field lengths are also cut down to proper size. If it is a simple yes/no value, then i use 0, 1, with it abstracted. This makes DB record fetching much more efficient overall.

It also fixes BUGS!!! the email user when getting a PM always gets hosed in 7.5.6 and below, because the admin code uses Yes/No for the value and the script side uses On and anything NOT On... egads... now it is simply $me->notifyPM, and the coder has no clue and doesn't care what the value is ( yes, it is 0, 1 now )

Many more changes to the underlying engine have been made.

Like lower case table names, for example. This allows going to/from linux/windows servers a no brainer.

( note: why you would go TO a windows server for ubbthreads is beyond me however . stay in unix, if you have a choice!! )

All in all, a TON of time was spent just cleaning up junk...

the scripts directory in 7.5.6 had 129 files.

the scripts directory in 7.6 has 98 and will be less when i'm done.

Same for the templates/default directory ( approximate same ratio )

Oh and surprise: there are even comments in the headers to say what the hell the file does and the filenames have been renamed to kinda be more logical...

example 'addaddress.inc.php' -- take a guess what it did.. yup.. no semantic meaning...

now it is included along with other files into one file called:

...

mywatches.inc.php

...

kinda more meaning there...

bla bla bla...

essentially, all this abstraction allows us to make proper DB changes that are needed to move forward without overhauling the code each time. The code stays the same and just the ONE FILE ( class.user.php ) changes to re-abstract the new DB to all the scripts...

what i did for the user class has also been done for the html, mysql, bbcode and mysql classes.

oh, and speaking of bbcode.. there was NO reason to include that file every time in ubbthreads, when the html class was the only one that used it. now, it is only loaded when needed. That is one HUGE class that isn't lugged around anymore.

Same goes for the mailer class...

use it when you need it..

too much more rambling to go here, but suffice to say, the code is much more streamlined, readable, commented AND SECURE!. ( all variables are sanitized.. they weren't before... yes, there are still obscure issues with 7.5.6 security and have been since 7.0 )

bottom line.. a LOT has been done and i can see the light at end of tunnel to beta...

hang in there... i have a couple more picture based posts to follow in the coming week

Admin gets a fresh coat of paint

Well, it actually gets a css overhaul.

The admin interface css and design was sorely lacking and needed to at least start to move towards html5 and css3.

This is step one and a small one, but it moves us off the dime.

No more images ( the .jpgs were corrupt anyway ) required, except for one logo image, that you can swap out for your own as desired.

( click the images for full size )


also, note that more helpful server information is contained on the landing page.



common css files are now in their own directory for clarity's sake



This is the extent of how far the Admin interface will be overhauled for 7.6. More in the future.

I am now in the final stretch of modifications.

Remaining items are:

1. Integrated image uploader ( could add drag / drop, if feasible )
2. Topics Archival
3. Miscellaneous small things

Then it will be on to beta.

As always, no time frame, but coding is much easier now, since the basic database objects have been abstracted.