Forum Design

[wabdev]

Is there a new forum design? I was on this morning and saw a different design with rounded tables etc - it looked very smart indeed, but now it's back to the other design again

[StuartDH]

Hi Kinfol,

Yep, we've got a new design for the forum and you must have caught us playing around with it whilst doing some testing etc.

It'll probably come and go from the site for the rest of today but by tomorrow it will be our new look permanent design.

Most of the rest of the site is getting the same treatment over the next few weeks so that it will have a similar look, so we hope you like it.

As always, please let us know if you spot any errors or parts that are too difficult to read etc

Cheers

Stuart

[James]

I'm using a 1024 resolution like I'm sure many others are

Any chance that the frame can be indefinately sized so that it doesn't look restricting on resolutions above 800 pixels?

Anyways, I hope this will become a widely-used resource. It looks very good so far

[StuartDH]

Hi James,

Thanks for your feedback, I'm also using a large screen (1600x1200) and admit that the site is narrow than I'd like it to be, but more than 20% of visitors are using 800x600 so we've had to restrict the width of the site to make it look fairly uniform for most users.

Unfortunately, with such a fixed-width design this leaves us larger screen users with large bands of white space on either side of the site, but at least it prevents some of the major headaches that can occur with a variable width.

Ideally, we hope to put together a few different templates to cater for 2/3 major screen resolutions and then let the user select which one works best for them. This shouldn't be too difficult, but unfortunately it's sitting in a very long 'to-do' list of jobs that we're currently working on.

As always, we'll be happy to push the mod up the list if the demand is strong enough, so your request has just seen it rise a few places

[StuartDH]

I've just made a new template for the forum and gallery, so you should now be able to view more with a 1024 screen.

Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and choose 1024 from the drop-down menu on the left.

It should work OK, but let me know if you have any problems.

Hopefully, we'll get round to building similar display selectors for the rest of the site fairly soon.

Cheers

Stuart

[James]

Thanks Stuart. I'll give it a try.

I was just comparing it to another PHPBB-powered board that I visit. Perhaps the text could be one size larger? Other than that I think it works well

[StuartDH]

No problem. We've already built parts of the site with adjustable text size and will hopefully have it working the same across the whole site soon enough.

If you take a look at the directory - http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk/directory/ - and then choose from the options in the - 'View' > 'Text Size' - at the very top of an Internet Explorer browser, you should be able to view the directory in very small to very large text.

To-do list item No. 46

[James]

I find the recent posts column very helpful, but is there a way to display the number of pages of the threads?

Just a suggestion

[StuartDH]

I'm sure it's something that we could add with a bit of tinkering, but it may throw up a few problems with some of the other features on the forum.

Some of the users have the facility to select the number of posts that they view for each thread - 10, 25, 50 etc. With the current default set at 10, a thread of 28 posts is usually spread over three pages, but for some users, who have set their view to 30 posts per page, they only see one page.

I'll see what our forum developer can come up with, but I think it may be a bigger job that it first appears.