A more Contemporary Theme/Layout (Think Penny Arcade)
mcu_hq
yippie ki-yay ✭✭✭
More pics: http://imgur.com/a/ByNPp#6
It is still a work in progress, but the majority of it is working. I hope to have my site up live in the coming days. I started off by using the popular Dark Mist theme.
When I first started using Vanilla, I was very surprised of the lack of a typical forum layout. I noticed that Vanilla tried to be different by supporting this "All Discussions" view, but as your forum gets bigger and more complex, this strategy falls apart and it is hard to moderate. I read on these forums that a lot of people shared my sentiments.
I really liked how lightweight Vanilla was and how it brought some new ideas to the table. The majority of other forums will just have a lot of crap floating around not doing anything except consuming database calls (need I say SMF?). I finally dove in and discovered that it was remarkably easy to adapt the code and tweak it to my liking to create this theme (You can thank your Vanilla Core Developers for that). It is not exactly like the infamous Penny Arcade, but it was not my intent to mirror it. In fact, their theme is pretty much the standard layout that most forum software will default to. Obviously they look similar because they are both a table layout to some degree.
I really just kept hacking at Vanilla until I got it to listen. The code is not very clean and it required some heavy modifications to the HTML, but it wasn't too bad. I hope to make this a theme, but I had to hook onto a lot of events to do the trick which probably classifies this as a theme/plugin hybrid. All of my modifications leave the hooks intact. No guarantee that all of the plugins will work with it, but time will tell.
As you can see, all plugins that hook onto the sidebar will not be supported. However, you can still put some of that crap in the footer if you wish. Honestly, I think designers should dedicate the majority of the screen to the content anyways. I go to a forum to read topics that I am interested in, not to see who is browsing the forum or who is in the discussion.
I will list some of the new features as I think of them:
- Fluid Layout (will shrink to 600px for people on small monitor)
- Pushed that damn footer to bottom
- Execution time on footer
- Move page numbers to top and bottom of discussion thread
- Page numbering style is similar to Penny Arcade ex1 and ex2
- Added the "goto last post" green button (clicking on title goes to start of thread)
- Breadcrumbs on every page so you don't get lost
- Integrates with the voting plugin (optional turn-off)
- Discussion will show view count and its own breadcrumb
- View/thread/vote count uses big numbers (think penny arcade)
- Added a trace back link above each post
- Search box modified for a more sleeker look
- Added a "New Thread" button for discussions
**Works in IE6 and up***
Only topics that have no children are able to receive topics. If a category has any children, its URL will direct to another page listing its children. This is something that Penny Arcade does not do, but I like my forums structured this way.
The "Latest Post" and such will traverse the category to get all of its children. From there, it will grab the latest information to display.
///@todo in order of priority
Make the "All Discussions" and "Popular" buttons give relative results. For example, under the "Microcontrollers Thread", the "All Discussions" button will only display threads that are children of the Microcontroller parent.
Implement a "Hover over and preview" script. Essentially this will allow you to hover over any thread to see some of the body and statistics without clicking on the link. This will help on page load times and increase view count potentially.
////////////////////////
I'll be updating this thread with new things as I develop them. For now, if anyone wants to test it, you can send me a PM. I don't feel comfortable putting this on Vanilla before a few people try it out. All I ask is that you put a referrer link to my website (which will hopefully be up sooner or later).
Comments
I'd be happy to help you test this out. I'm still generating content for my site so it and the forums aren't officially launched yet, but since I've not found the right "theme" yet, I'd be happy to test for you.
I'm not a great coder (but I once made a mean HTML site about Pokemon in the 90s) so I'd like to contribute to Vanilla in whatever other ways I can. QA is probably right up my alley!
wow, wow, wow.
Thanks @mcu_hq for making this style of theme. Even I have been thinking to make such theme for a long time. This is certainly needed.
Tell me how can I help you in some way.
There was an error rendering this rich post.
I'm testing it out right now for the first time, and it looks awesome.
Sorry, I think my brain is fried from making dummy posts in the forum I'm testing. I made one here by accident!
Are you and mcu_hq the same person cappazushi ? And you forgot your alter ego hadnt released the theme yet ???
There was an error rendering this rich post.
No, I'm testing it out for him.
It looks awesome, but I'm also looking forward to the fabled "Penny Arcade theme" that vanillaskins.com is working on. Battle time!
No, this is not true. I gave @cappazushi the download links yesterday so he could try it out before I put it as an addon & theme. I mentioned that if anyone want to spend their time trying it out, they could PM me to do so. I wanted to be confident that it works with other people's setup before releasing the first version. Surely you can understand.
I sent @422 a PM a few weeks ago inquiring about your penny arcade theme (under username, newuser2). I was hoping to use yours since I had no interest in creating one myself if someone could do it better. I heard back that you were not going to make one, and so I created one myself.
My intent is not competition...I don't have anything to gain here. I just thought that it would be convenient for others. This thread can be sunk for all I care.
This is not a professional theme by any means, but rather a proof of concept. It is free for anyone to use, but it will carry the chance that stuff will break and it may be up to the user to solve it himself. This is when a professional theme would be worth it.
No need to explain, just bemused by comments above. Go for it.
We began playing with theme, but to complex for us.
www.vanillaskins.com/penny-forum
We will not be releasing penny clone, i know when im beaten
There was an error rendering this rich post.
Sorry, I didn't mean to start anything. Just tried making a joke I suppose.
Anyway, @mcu_hq I'm going through some add-ons and testing out various features for you, and making a list of everything I've noticed. I hope it's helpful to you, and I'll post them later.
Is there any way to have the theme not run the voting plugin, or is that essentially a manditory part of the code?
has there been any recent progress on this theme?
Vanilla Wiki, Tastes Great! 31,000 viewers can't be wrong. || Plugin Development Explained
I haven't heard from him in a while.
Sorry, I have been quite busy with work and playing way too much xbox. I've been adding new things and fixing the old ones. I'll post the functional plugin/theme duo in the coming week(s).
Sounds good!
@mcu_hq any updates? We all have eagerly waiting for this theme.
There was an error rendering this rich post.
Ok, sorry for the delay.
I uploaded both the plugin and the theme. This release is much improved from the first one (thanks to @cappazushi). The duo is not fully complete yet, however I noticed that Vanilla V2.1 has included some of the features that I already put in. Because of this, I am releasing this now so as to not waste any more time writing things that will be implemented in the future anyways.
There are still a lot of things that I wish to finish whenever v2.1 comes out:
I would VERY much like to see some way of ordering the damn side panel. The current method with the config file only works for the built-in modules. I tried doing some jankety things of fixing this, but am going to leave it up for the core developers to solve.
I think I'm gonna focus more on my site now and leave vanilla alone for some time.
If you find any issues that I have not pointed out in the addons, let me know and I'll try to fix whenever 2.1 is out.
go here for a live preview .
Login with:
user: test
pass: test
wow!! amazing! i was also creating a theme like this but with no luck.
this theme rocks!
Check out my other Plugins here
one word .... beautiful.
@mcu_hq all my love to you.
There was an error rendering this rich post.