Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

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digitaltoast
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by digitaltoast »

I came here specifically looking for info about modernizing Prosilver and this seems like an excellent and very worthy project here in this thread.

I can't believe people want to hold this back. This is 2011, not 2007! IE6 is dead, move on. If people want to live the past, give them the choice of the old version.

Meantime, I'm more than happy to test any updated version. I'll keep checking back.

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hanakin
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by hanakin »

The main thing holding this movement back is javascript work I myself am not the best scripter all the javascript functionality needs completely rewritten using jQuery as to completely remove all in-line event handling. This will also lay the ground work for future features/enhancements that jQuery can bring to the software.

Check out this viewtopic.php?f=108&t=33747 post to find out more.

If interested in helping with this & possess the skills to do so, shoot me a pm or post here.

As for the rest of the work. The theme could stand for some Browser Compatibility testing although I have not done much work as of late and am short on time for the next few weeks. Feel free to create an account on the test forum and have at it or use the moderator account I have provided and post any issues this would help drastically as well.
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sgbotsford
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by sgbotsford »

I spend a good deal of time working on my web site to have a consistent font usage and colour scheme. So now, I'm adding a bb system, and of course I chose the market leader.

However... I want to do the board in greens and yellows instead of blues and greys. My board uses serif fonts, not sans-serif fonts. (Grey is NEVER the right colour for text.) I want to use the same border style on the BB that I use on my website.
These are non-trivial changes to make.

The CSS stylesheet seems needless complex and redundant, making minimal use of inheritance. It's getting close to 4000 lines. Is that really necessary? E.g. font-family is defined 29 times. Most of those have the same 4 fonts, but the order is not consistent. This makes the appearance cluttered looking.

Would it not be better form to define font family ONCE, and let it inherit. E.g. All text inherits from <body> The style sheet does this with font size already. (otherwise specifying H1 as 2em wouldn't work)

so factor out the constant stuff and attribute it to body.

Color is defined 394 times. Yowser! Of these there are 126 unique ones. Of 126 colours 55 are shades of grey



How can I help?







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hanakin
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by hanakin »

sgbotsford wrote: How can I help?
I guess that depends on what skills you posses as I stated in the previous post jquery skills are the biggest thing we are in need of?

How ever the current process for improvement is to do it piece by piece in order to slowly convert the user base over. This means that each progression is handled separately one of which is the CSS as you have pointed out it is a mess.

However the HTML will not be changing anytime soon, in fact it will be that last piece of the puzzle to be altered as it makes the biggest impact on the users if it ever changed lol. Therefore its been proposed that we completely rewrite and restructure the CSS while leaving the HTML alone as to improve upon all the problems with the current CSS. This is also the only step I have yet to create an RFC for.

Feel free to pm me and we can further discuss things
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Ceil
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by Ceil »

I agree prosilver should use CSS, and no inline javascript. HTML5 elements aren't supported by older browsers so lets stick to HTML. :)
Thanks for the mockup it's great.

Cheers,

Steve

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Sierron
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by Sierron »

Ceil wrote:I agree prosilver should use CSS, and no inline javascript. HTML5 elements aren't supported by older browsers so lets stick to HTML. :)
Thanks for the mockup it's great.
Cheers,Steve
prosilver uses xhtml ...

Some things in this topic sound interesting while others are not that kind of thing i want to see :/

Edit:

As for the IE6 thing: I'm for it to drop support for IE6. It's time to move on. Even Microsoft want to get rid of it.

http://ie6countdown.com/

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hanakin
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by hanakin »

Sierron wrote: Some things in this topic sound interesting while others are not that kind of thing i want to see :/
/
what exactly is it you disagree with? also keep inmind that this topic has evolved since its creation and is still massively in flux. Is there anything specific you wish to see changed or fixed.

I have been extremely busy lately and have not put much if any work on this project as of late but that will soon change I hope lol :).
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/a3
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by /a3 »

Xdega wrote:I am admin of the WHATWG discussion forums (forums.whatwg.org). The general consensus is that we naturally want to implement a HTML5/CSS3 standards compliant BBS.
I would be very interested in testing out the forums with redone HTML5/CSS3 markup for use with the WHATWG community.

I am very interested in this effort. Using the newer semantic elements of html5 is a great idea.
<section>, <aside>, <article>, <nav>, <footer> etc. are definitely the way forward and easy to implement.

I also think that web fonts (such as the Google fonts API) and CSS3 transitions are a nice touch, although there is limited support they degrade gracefully.

I think 3.2 is definitely a good time to start the work with new semantics, this will mean a better transition to phpbb4 (as newer elements will already be used).

If anyone has information on potential testing of this modernization effort, please hit me up and I will be happy to test drive it.

Also for reference: http://www.whatwg.org has links to a lot of information on the html spec. And there is a nice spec document designed for the web developers perspective:
developers.whatwg.org
My opinion on HTML5 has change somewhat, after reading a bit of the spec a few months ago and the reasoning behind it.

I believe this could be implemented quite easily in phpBB with the current templating system. I'd like to have a go at creating a style for phpBB, but time is not permitting at the moment, perhaps in a few months.

The only thing is, as I believe it may or may not have been said by someone else, there might be some opposition to using a draft specification for a default style, although it seems a lot of those tags you mentioned are pretty much set in stone anyway. However, naderman seems to have given the okay to the use of HTML5 here.
$ git commit -m "YOLO"

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hanakin
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by hanakin »

/a3 wrote:My opinion on HTML5 has change somewhat, after reading a bit of the spec a few months ago and the reasoning behind it.

I believe this could be implemented quite easily in phpBB with the current template system. I'd like to have a go at creating a style for phpBB, but time is not permitting at the moment, perhaps in a few months.

The only thing is, as I believe it may or may not have been said by someone else, there might be some opposition to using a draft specification for a default style, although it seems a lot of those tags you mentioned are pretty much set in stone anyway. However, naderman seems to have given the okay to the use of HTML5 here.
This is all dependent on when and how the theme is released.

While those tags might be pretty much set in stone by now the semantic use of them might change which would defeat the purpose for this RFC which is to semantisize prosilver

I am all for the push to html5 however such a huge html shift to just semantics for html4 is difficult enough with versioning and the state of the styles. It would just be too much too fast If we wish to try and push a semantic version of prosilver asap.

I could maybe see this happening for a completely new theme which is more what I had in mind for 4.0.
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MattF
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Re: Prosilver Overhaul/Modernization

Post by MattF »

Switching to HTML5 is so stupidly easy and simple, it really should be done.

Just change in overall_header.html

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-gb" xml:lang="en-gb">
to this:

Code: Select all

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
Of course, to get it to validate at the W3C you have to make a few more minor tweaks, like:
  • removing some of the obsolete <meta> tags
  • removing the obsolete "name" attribute from anchor tags, and instead use the ID attribute as an inline anchor point
Although this also raises the question: is validation even necessary anymore? Go to any major site: github, google, cnn, youtube, twitter - try validating them. None of them pass. I think validation is only valid these days for web designers with bosses they have to please :lol:

Anyway, you don't HAVE to use the new HTML5 tags to be an HTML5 site ;) Of course, a future version of phpBB (maybe v4) should be HTML5 from the ground up, making use of the new HTML5 tags. By then, the really old browsers will be so much older they can finally be ignored. And if not, there are plenty of ways to make them HTML5 aware, such as with the MODERNIZR or HTML5SHIV js plugins.
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