Following the launch of 7.6.0 I am very excited. I have had to make some changes to the header I made around 12 years ago, but from now on we're VERY mobile friendly! Woow!
I must say over the last years I have always been changing some stuff in the templates and scripts which I have to do over and over again. I will list them below.
1/ iso instead of utf-8
I've dragged this board forward since 2001. The initial installation has been left unchanged so everything is still iso encoded. Every time, I have to manually edit the generic language file to reflect this. I also have to add a htaccess / php instruction to treat php output as iso. It would be so nice to take this into account.
2/ post icons
It might sound boring, but we only have one post icon. I have to manually remove all post icons (it would be nice to put this in packs!) and manually edit out the 'no icon' in the html.inc.php file. Still leaves me with a selection possibility of one single item. Would be nice to detect this.
3/ image posting
We have our own custom tag to include images (triggering a popup). Even when I disallow img tag in posts, the image button is still there in the text editor. It would be nice to take the setting into account so the image button no longer appears.
4/ admin iso
even though the generic language file is set to iso, the control panel requires an extra line of header code in the admin.inc.php file to show the correct characters
5/ avatar size
There is an inline style to pull the width to 150px wide in the profile pages (also followers / friends). I always change this so it doesn't stretch smaller images. Also the inline sizes skew the image due to not taking into account proportions.
6/ Topic tooltip preview
Irrelevant in mobile, because you can't 'hover'. Should be turned off there. Now it just pops up when you click the link, which is a bit silly.
7/ RSS charset
Yeah I keep coming back to this. The RSS charset is defined as UTF-8, breaking RSS feeds if the database is iso. Manual edit required here as well. Should also take into account the generic setting.
8/ Title editing on replies
I don't like that people can change the title in a reply. It's been the cause of much confusion. I know there is a function to retitle all replies, but that's post-fact fixing. I always edit the files so people can't set a new title. I also do this in the edit screen, even though a result of that is that the original title can also not be edited. I don't care too much about that, but the thinking is not 100%.
9/ Font and size selection
We don't have font family / size selection. I've emptied the boxes in the control panel. However, I also always have to edit the text editor template to remove the (then empty) buttons for this.
10/ Favorite topic
My members hate it when the 'follow this topic' is checked as standard when posting a new post or a full screen reply. I always have to edit that out in the newpost and newreply templates.
11/ Moving to a new domain
I would also suggest to create a 'move' script, which for example searches the database for the old URL in posts / ... and replaces it with the new URL. We have recently done a move and this has demanded a lot of .htaccess work to fix several issues (not just related to the forum), to make sure old (even internal) links and images (avatars,...) to work again.
12/ Graemlins etc.
I've always stuck with the Graemlins that were created at the very beginning. My users also like them. They're clean and timeless. Every upgrade, I have to restore them from a backup.
The above always make an upgrade last an hour instead of just a matter or minutes. I always am afraid for an upgrade as well, since the character setting for example could at one point just disappear. Making me unable to go further.
It would be nice to turn the above into settings / options / ... in the control panel. Or image packs for avatars, forum images,...
