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:: minck wrote :: Though it would be so nice to run one of the less-bloated forums like punBB or miniBB - the thought of 'axeing features' usually gets me all excited. You all over here at techpatterns consider lighter-weight alternatives? How 'bout you, vkaryl, you seem to be quite the forum baroness.I use phpBB because I LIKE all that stuff that the "light" versions don't have. Sorry - no help here! Hope y'all have a great New Year's Eve and Day, without the sometimes-attendant effects of overindulgence.... Back to top |
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Minck, thanks for the feedback, is this what you're looking for?:
:: Code :: You all over here at techpatterns consider lighter-weight alternatives? How 'bout you, vkaryl, you seem to be quite the forum baroness.
Really like the way the forums are looking. One very minor gripe: code divs are a bit hard on the eyes with the black / very bright green combo - I changed the green to #34DC34 instead of #34FC34 and it looked quite a bit more legible (less eye-frying). Sounds like a compliment, :-), thanks. I'd sort of noticed the too high contrast too but liked the garishness but have to admit I knew I'd be toning it down eventually. Refresh cached css to see change, it is easier on the eyes, though that bright green is what I use on the command line for now, makes me happy... but feedback, especially constructive feedback with options listed is great, no problems changing stuff. I second Vkaryl, I like the features of PHPbb, if you know some are unneeded you can cut them out, the programming logic is easy to follow, at least it's fairly easy, I think for you it would be very easy. Most stuff is pretty modular, enough to make changes not too bad. Remember to take notes of your changes though, since you'll need them for security updates etc. PHPBB :: Bloat or Utility? Minck, don't take the 'bloated' stuff for granted, I do another forum for a friend that got on the forum spammers automated join to get website listed in member's area [a waste of time for my stuff because all that is blocked, for that reason, in robots.txt.] Some of the management stuff has come in very handy during the last few months as I have to remove and ban users, emails, ip addresses etc. I went to phpbb originally because a programmer friend and me were looking at various options out there, and phpbb had by far the best coding standards out there. That's something I still think. Their separation of templating system and core logic is outstanding, there's a few tiny glitches here and there, but the more I work on this stuff, the more I admire how flexible phpbb is. For example, check out another phpbb forum, then check this one out again. Notice that all url's are now search engine friendly, whether or not you are logged in. This was an easy mod to do, it's a mod of another mod, the search engine friendly phpbb one. However, long term, the original mod should be dumped, and straight standard urls should be used through the whole site, no page wide regular expression rewrite, that's horribly processor inefficient, much better to recode all url functions to make them output the standard urls to begin with, then just use mod_rewrite to translate those urls back to query strings. Because PHPBB supports default guest anonymous posting, it's written for sid query strings as default, that's unfortunate in my opinion, I think it would be almost better to have two side by side versions, one fully search engine friendly, out of the box setup, cookie based login required, and one query string sid based one, that would solve a lot of problems, but then again, it gives some of us a bit of an advantage to have it be defaulting to the worst possible search engine format known to the web.. heh heh heh... I might submit this mod of their mod to them, or as a stand-alone. I think you'll find that phpbb's code is very pleasant to work with, there are problems, but they are easy to work within. You can pretty easily hack out components, the poll option for example is resource consuming and a total waste of time as far as I'm concerned, and mysql connections. But it's easy to change that. The more I use it, the more I like it, and the more respect I have for the decisions they made a few years ago. Still some things that shouldn't be there at all, globals for example, but not that many, it's manageable, when they put this out for PHP 5 all that will have to go anyway, they should dump it now. If you want my tpl stuff I can zip it up for you, but I'd prefer if you don't distribute it further until I do some more work on it. It's a work in progress, but I have cut out a very large chunk of bloat and bad html, maybe almost 40-50% of the page code from a stock phpbb install. [I don't like images, what can I say? Using 3-600 bytes to communicate about 10-15 bytes of text data just strikes me as silly] The CSS is a problem, I stupidly tried to work within the original junk css/html for a year, which means the css is a mess, some of mine, some of the original, hard to tell them apart, plus a big extra chunk for the header. I'll be cutting all that down hopefully this week, make it more coherent, cut out extraneous CSS. However, the tpl stuff also has many mods built in, some of which are connected to code mods, so it's not what you'd see with a standard installation. But there might actually be a template now that's much better, I'd hope so, this one is about 2 years old, or was, it was one of the cleaner ones out there when I first checked, but there must be a better one by now, better css / html. For future stuff, make topic text be in paragraphs, make font sizing bb code put out <hx> tags instead of span size tags. Real HTML that is. Back to top |
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Oh, since Jeff forgot to tell you, Happy New Year to you all, hope it's a good one. Not too many headaches, not too much horrible client work, maybe even a good one or two, or a successful project, whatever it is.
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jeff, I'd like the .tpl stuff you've written if you wouldn't mind. ALL my fora are strictly private.... wouldn't go anywhere else....
Also, keep an eye on phpBB2.2 or whatever they're calling it these days (by this time, I'D call it 3.0, but that's just me....) Anyway, it will have a lot of the "missing" stuff by default.... [As to techAdmin's wishes for the New Year *sigh* - remind me to tell you all about my latest client one of these days.... *DOUBLE SIGH*] Back to top |
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I'd wait a bit for the tpl stuff, I've been hacking away at the code the last few days, it's amazing how small you can get these pages if you just cut out all the garbage and actually use CSS properly.
Main index is down to about 14.5 kB, CSS is massively cut, down to about 11.5 kB, simple topic pages with only a few posts come in at 11-12 kB, amazing, all those little extra HTML attributes and surplus span tags really add up. I lost a little compatibility with NS 4x, but it doesn't crash it, amazingly, even with NS 4 getting almost all the CSS. At least now it fits in better with the techpatterns coding style, full CSS. :: Quote :: As to techAdmin's wishes for the New Year *sigh* - remind me to tell you all about my latest client one of these days.... *DOUBLE SIGH*]ha ha, tell me about it, if you only knew the kind of stuff I have to do to pay the bills, some clients and their jobs are, how do you put it, well, let's say this, I've worked on their sites for years and have never read any of the stuff I put up. It's better that way... then again, last year I got a really great client, so I guess it balances out, and also got a cool job doing networking at a big organiztion, so a little of the good, a little of the bad. Back to top |
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Thanks for the notes re. phpBB's features - stuff like avatars, smilies, etc., I can really do without - but then again, punBB and miniBB have these anyways. The HTML in phpBB sorta scared me too - but I can digest bloated HTML better than bloated php, there are usually answers to bloated HTML. It's the stuff like flood control and bad user control that I suspected phpBB would have pretty well-covered, and the lighter versions not. Looks like I'll be going with phpBB then. Just wished editing the templates was easier than it seemed last time I looked at it - must say, though, you all here at techpatterns have done a great job, but I bet it took a lot of wading through stuff "what's this doing here?" "what's that doing there?" etc..
Well, you have definitely got me interested in your template. I won't even be close to putting up a forum in the next week, maybe even the next month, but when I do I'll ask you for the template. This is the first time that I note you've done a nice mod_rewrite hack -- congrats, it's looking nice, and a 'slim and efficient' one is definitely something to cherish. Yeah, writing down every last thing that you changed is a good idea indeed. A few years back I did a site for an organization based on an open source CMS and add a whole slew of features, while eliminating a whole bunch of others. The CMS grew and now has those features I'd axed as optional, but now I can't upgrade easily since I didn't keep a nice, clean changelog, and would have to wade through all sorts of code to figure out how to make the new version CMS do what the very, very old hacked version does. You know, I wonder if something like that exists - a changelog utility - allows you to sort changes by file, author, date, importance, with functionality / functions / classes / variables keywords? That would be handy indeed for bigger projects. You'd think stuff like CVS systems or PHPxref or PHPdoc would be the most likely, but I haven't yet noted this sort of functionality in them - hotscripts doesn't show much in a search for "changelog" - google's tough, since every php script in sf has a changelog. Something like this might be worthwhile. Back to top |
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:: Quote :: Just wished editing the templates was easier than it seemed last time I looked at it - must say, though, you all here at techpatterns have done a great job, but I bet it took a lot of wading through stuff "what's this doing here?" "what's that doing there?" etc.. It took us a while to get this stuff figured out, but there was enough free time over the last month to start really playing with this thing. The templates are really bad, but I think the new version of techForum Styles is not that bad. It cuts out a lot of the junk without sacrificing any functionality at all. Yes, it took over a year of poking at it, what's this do, what's that do?, but I have to admit, this tpl we've been using has been bugging me for a while now, it was never well written, very bad HTML. It all validates now too I think, haven't double checked, a few pages might not, that's a small problem that phpbb doesn't correctly insert & characters in posted links, or rather, it will correctly change the characters until you edit the post, then it doesn't keep it, that might be a browser issue actually, and not phpbb's fault [also another reason that XHTML can't be used if user input is allowed, no matter how careful you are]. I'd wait a week or two, I'll see how these new tpl / css mods go, there wasn't much changed in the php programming, but there is a little, the search engine mods and our mods on those are pretty substantial. But I can already tell the difference, these pages load very very fast. I think vkaryl, being a dialup user, will really be able to tell the difference now. This is about as trimmed down as we can get the pages, we'll check over a few other things before releasing any of this code. Back to top |
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I realize that this is last year's thread, but the season is here, again. May you all have a wonderful ChristMas time.
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