Forum Features Suggestion Thread

As you may have noticed, we developers think this new forum is pretty neat. Much of this is down to the fact that pretty much any of it can be customised. So we ask: are there any features, perhaps from the old forums that you miss, you’d like to see implemented here? Whether layout, functional or other, a bit of code fiddling can probably make it work.

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Changing the text’s color at the writer’s discretion would be nice, for forum games and all that buisness

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You’ve obviously missed the colour button in the post editor. Click the paintbrush then replace # with the colour you want.

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Woah nice, thanks for the advice !

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I want to do something more interesting with the after header area (exclusively on the home page so it’s not an annoyance), particularly something which can keep people up to date with development to stop them asking whether we’re dead every other day. This is the design I’ve come up with:

Most of this should be possible with div boxes and such. The sticking points are the RSS feeds. I can’t find a free service which offers the degree of flexibility I want and I don’t know whether I want to jump into programming it myself. I may have to in the end.

What do you all think? Any suggestions for other things to display?

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Nice, I like it ! It’s very “smooth”

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I think I’ve gotten as far as I realistically can without delving into the difficult world of RSS. Don’t be fooled by the current announcement shown - all the info is entered manually, not taken automatically from a feed source. I just wanted to get the formatting right.

@hhyyrylainen Not to put too much work on your shoulders, but would you know a way to display content from an RSS source? See the image I posted above, so it would be similar to the launcher. I tried some Javascript items but Discourse won’t allow embedding of Javascript in the after header area.

Also, if anyone does look at the CSS and HTML files…I’m not actually a programmer, ok? It doesn’t matter if they’re messy if they work.

I kind of want to paste the HTML code here so that other people can see your bad work - but, I doubt there’s enough characters for that and I might actually get banned for posting so much into one post.

It should be possible to add javascript to the themes to do stuff.

Where did you define the boxes, I didn’t find them in any of the themes?

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The boxes are in the desktop-exclusive HTML for the Vincent theme, and the associated CSS is in the general section.

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Found them. I’ll try to put in a script that sets their content.

Okay when I put the script in the /head part of the theme it is actually put on the page and is ran (and now the right most box is my message)

So if you can get the content from somewhere and put it there that would be the way to go. Just if the feed isn’t 100% safe it should be sanitized to remove all dangerous things. I’ve got some code to do that in the launcher (which is javascript so it can be used here as well).

There’s now content in those feeds but it isn’t styled so bare with us for a while with the broken main page.

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You had one job.

well, at least the forum hasn’t imploded and killed us all yet.

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Still a bit broken but at least ignorable now. I’ll get to formatting feed content tomorrow.

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Right, formatting is finally in a decent state. Visit the home page to have a look for yourselves.

There are two more things to do: include GitHub activity in the development feed and add dates to items. @hhyyrylainen might have to have a hand in those.

Also, I’ve been told the boxes look too small on some monitors. Any opinions on their size and layout and where they should go otherwise? Realistically we can only move things around in the after header area, that is the section after the main header but before the categories/latest/new/unread/top menu.

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I’ll get on adding the dates.

The max heights seem to be slightly off:

Edit: the dates have been added I’ll see what I can do to get the github feed.

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That’s because height is set assuming the heading takes up only one line. I can’t find a way to set height dynamically to adjust for that.

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Ta da, a finished new header. I rearranged the boxes and trimmed down their size to cut down on clutter and stop the actual page content moving further down the page than it should be. If most people think the original layout was better, or that the announcement and feed boxes should be taller no matter the impact to forum content, then I can change it back.

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It just kinda looks like you squished it all together in despracy. Is there no way to have it at the side?

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