My ideas for 4.0 :D

General discussion of development ideas and the approaches taken in the 3.x branch of phpBB. The current feature release of phpBB 3 is 3.3/Proteus.
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uk_martin
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Re: My ideas for 4.0 :D

Post by uk_martin »

Sierron wrote:Lots of things
I guess we are all entitled to our opinions. Some thing that groups, ranks, flags, and smilies are important, others don't, some see social networking integration as important, and others don't...

One thing is for certain though, not planning for the future means that for certain you won't be there to enjoy the future.

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Sierron
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Re: My ideas for 4.0 :D

Post by Sierron »

uk_martin wrote:One thing is for certain though, not planning for the future means that for certain you won't be there to enjoy the future.
honestly? I hate facebook and all those stupid social communities. I don't want my board to rely on any random crap community outside my site. I want my forum as a standalone version. I don't need blogs, i don't need a video sharing section. It's a forum after all. If you want a social community, look for scripts which can do that.

There is one board which wasn't that active for quite some time. After they intigrated some of those sharing things, the site got more visitors, BUT all of the new visitors are stupid honks. They spam, write usless crap and other stuff. Social intigration is not always the best thing to do. Especially if you get all the idiots on your site.

aelitahopper
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Re: My ideas for 4.0 :D

Post by aelitahopper »

uk_martin wrote: 1. Allowing users to select whether they want the mini-profiles in ViewTopic to be on the left or right hand side of the postings.
useful, but not critical
uk_martin wrote: 2. Expanding on Custom User Profile Fields, to allow users to add Youtube, Facebook, Skype (and others, not yet invented) contact information. Just having PM and e-mail is too “retro” to be going forward with. There are MODs that give this functionality at the moment, but doubtless they won’t work in the new codebase, so with some forward planning the functionality can continue without the need for new MODs
perhaps, but a moving target, i can see however a mechanism in the acp to allow the administrators to more easily define custom profile fields for their users
uk_martin wrote: 3. The “Add User” facility currently missing in the ACP
for sure, the ability for an administrator to create accounts on private sites or simply create 'test accounts' is useful
uk_martin wrote: 4. Automatic avatar and image resizing according to Administrator-set parameters in the ACP.
that would be useful, using what image api? gd? imagemagick? or allow the admin to chose? though not every server comes with those abilities so it should be optional.
uk_martin wrote: 5. SEO Optimisation to take on board all the good work going on here - http://www.phpbb-seo.com/ - e.g. "friendly URL's" etc etc.
meh, seo optimization is little more than smoke and mirrors for the most part
uk_martin wrote: 1. The use of HTML5 is a must.
not really, html5 is nowhere near ready for prime time
uk_martin wrote: 2. Mobile Phone Friendly CSS’s are a must.
meh, more like mobile phone friendly themes, but that's separate from the core code
uk_martin wrote: 3. Tighter integration with Wordpress.
why wordpress? why not drupal? joomla? or any of dozens of other cmses out there?
uk_martin wrote: 4. A “point and alter” CSS editor, which can be used for clicking on an element of the page, and allowing for the editing of the CSS that underlies that element on the page. There are Firefox plug-ins which allow for the identification of the CSS code for an element, but how much nicer would it be if phpBB could not only identify the CSS element, (and which CSS file it comes from) but could also edit & save it to a new theme.
meh, phpbb is a forum software for the most part, so i can't imagine too much dynamic alteration of the pages, but i can see where you're going, perhaps firebug lite integration (http://getfirebug.com/firebuglite)
as for dynamically altering the pages, as long as it is only editing the templates stored in the database (as in phpbb3) that might work, but that sounds a bit tenuous at best
uk_martin wrote: 5. A WYSIWYG editor please. The next generation of users don’t want stone age interfaces, they want what they are familiar with from Word etc. I don’t care if they are BBCode or Rich Text based, the user experience is what I am interested in, I’ll leave it to coding gurus to battle it out over which method is best.
maybe, but they can also be a headache as well
uk_martin wrote: 6. More Social Networking integration. Allowing Youtube, Picassa, Flickr content “natively” in posts would be a big plus. Allowing logging in from Facebook (Yes, there’s a MOD for that at the moment) and broadcasting discussions back to Facebook too (yes, another MOD for that exists too)
meh, then you have a site that's full of holes, and embedding content "natively" can be achieved through custom bbcodes, which would be a useful tool (custom bbcodes like vbuletin allows)
uk_martin wrote: 7. Preparing for the adoption of mobile blogging such as AudioBoo, Qik or Ustream as methods of contributing to board discussions.
blogging? this is a forum software not a blog
uk_martin wrote: 8. Looking at methods for using the phpBB board as a replacement for the “Comments” facility on Wordpress and other blogs.
that can probably already be done using some of it's APIs
uk_martin wrote: 9. A “Facebook-esque” Portal page, which Administrators can customize to suit their purposes.
good lord no, a portal page might certainly be useful, but i woudn't want anything like facebook which just plain sucks

uk_martin
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Re: My ideas for 4.0 :D

Post by uk_martin »

aelitahopper wrote:
uk_martin wrote: 7. Preparing for the adoption of mobile blogging such as AudioBoo, Qik or Ustream as methods of contributing to board discussions.
blogging? this is a forum software not a blog
It's communication. The passage of thoughts, ideas, experiences, comments, debates, or whatever. I suspect that in the passage of time between now and when v4 is ready, the world will have turned enough for the distinction between blogs and forums to become a lot less clear and that thought needs to be given on bringing things together rather than separating them into pigeon holes.

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imkingdavid
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Re: My ideas for 4.0 :D

Post by imkingdavid »

TssCman123 wrote:I think that phpBB 4 should have built in blogs, an image gallery, and custom pages (basically pages that you can insert your own content, and the header and footer will automatically be there). It would also be a good idea for it to have a built-in wiki, and portal (with forum widgets).
Would you like fries with that? [/sarcasm]
Sounds like you'd be better off with IPB or vBulletin (or as I like to call it, vBullcrap, but that's besides the point). Both of those have all those extraneous features that would bloat phpBB beyond recognition.

Keep in mind that phpBB is a bulletin board software (hence the "BB" in phpBB). It is not meant to be a blog, or a CMS, or a wiki, or an image gallery. It is meant to be a forum. A feature-filled and highly/easily extendable forum, yes, but a forum nonetheless.

But now that I've let your post hijack the thread, let me respond to the OP.
Teekeo wrote:• If one receives a new message, there should be a popup in the bottom right that says "New message from {name}. READ or READ LATER"
Sounds like a good MOD idea, but I'm not sure if it needs to be in the core.
Teekeo wrote:• If an uploaded avatar is too big, it should automatically be resized
This I can agree with. Instead of forcing the user to go through the hassle of either resizing it on their own or finding a new avatar of the appropriate size, it should be done automatically.
Although I think that they should be able to choose to either crop or resize it.
Teekeo wrote:• Buttons like quote, edit, delete, and PM should only appear when hovering over that post
That should be a per-style thing, not necessarily needed by default
Teekeo wrote:• When clicking on the quick reply button, have the box smoothly slide down instead of suddenly appearing
Again, can be done via styles. But since jQuery is going to be native (at least for 3.1, not sure about 4.0) that shouldn't be too difficult to implement.
Teekeo wrote:• Can use rich text editor instead of BBcode (users can select the option from UCP for which to use)
That's a good idea. I know there has been quite a bit of discussion for 3.x, but I don't know of any current working implementation or the verdict of such talks.
Teekeo wrote:• Display descriptions for the categories (not only the forums)
• Minimize categories
• Ability to click the box instead of the name of the forum
All of that can be done per style, not needed by default necessarily
Teekeo wrote:• To separate announcements from stickies, have announcements listed on the index page in each forum box
I don't see how that could look good... it would add to the clutter. But probably wouldn't be too difficult to add as a MOD.
Teekeo wrote:• Can choose whether to display the original post at the top of the page (regardless of what page of a thread youre on)
Better as a MOD instead of core.
Teekeo wrote:• Can choose not to display post count, or to change the name of post count ('Posts', 'Messages', etc.)
Can be changed in templates and language files.
Teekeo wrote:• Respect/kudos system
Also probably better as a MOD, but a good idea.
Teekeo wrote:• Custom CSS in ACP in designs section
Isn't that already possible? But I think they're scrapping that for either 3.1 or 3.2 because of all the issues people were having with losing their changes because they refreshed their styles.
Teekeo wrote:• Easy design builder (can choose colours & images & opacity levels & edges etc.) so people who don't know CSS can build a basic design
They just released a "ColorizeIt" thing on phpbb.com that lets users take any style and change the colors to their own liking. Would that suffice?
Teekeo wrote:• Extra links (allow extra links/navigation to be added at the top of the page so people can make their forum look exactly the same as their website to make the whole thing more fluent)
Again, something style specific. Since not everyone's navigation areas are the same, it would be difficult to find a way to accomplish this for all use cases.
Teekeo wrote:• In the UCP, have change Avatar & Signature on the first page of UCP since that is the most common thing for people to change
Having a "Recent pages" or "Most frequently accessed" link area would be nice. more dynamic, as it would allow quick access to whatever the user accesses the most often.
Teekeo wrote:• Video gallery (people can embed videos in on a different page designed entirely for videos)
Better as a MOD, not in the core.
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