Quick public service announcement: The CSS-Tricks forums will be unavailable starting now as the undergo awesomeness upgrades. I’ll update this post when they are back!
And they are back! Might be a bug here and there. Definitely let me know if you see one.
Chris you are the best! :D
awaiting next stats
Love your site .. thanks so much.. it always looks great.. now even better..
thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and insight.. Your site is my number one bookmark!
Especially for someone new in the industry your site is so very helpful. Although I suspect that the more experienced
find it to be a great asset as well..
thanks again.
The best to you ..
The forums feel disorganized now without the categories. Sure, there are still categories in the side bar, but it’s not organized like a general message board.
However, I do have some irregularities to report.
These are all in FF4b3:
* When viewing a profile, the sidebar doesn’t seem to float correctly, and appears beneath the “Get Help. Give Help.” portion.
* When not registered, the link buttons asking to Sign In and whatnot appear strangely.
I was actually thinking of pulling the categories entirely. Probably won’t though. I really like the fact you can just go to the homepage of the forums and see a list of topics going on rather than having the think about categories first.
I haven’t seen any of the weird layout stuff you mentioned, so if you can snag screenshots with browser/platform/version, that’d be super helpful.
Ah, actually, the issues I spotted seem to be with screen resolutions of 1024×768.
I have the same issue, Firefox 4 Beta 3 on Windows XP, there appears to to be too little margin between the buttons asking you to sign in or sign up. (screenshot of issue: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6810599/problem.png)
Moving on to the actual feel:
I think it is a little odd to have a different favicon from the main site, it could be just me but I think to keep the continuity of the site I would keep the same favicon as the rest of the site.
It does feel more cluttered then the previous design but I also think that it gives a more focused feel then the old design.
I noticed the names of the different forums, nice touch :)
Overall I think it is a good redesign that hopefully adds to the clean feel of the website.
In the forum section, on any resolution in FF4b3 the nav bar seems to actually grow in height.
I found another issue on the forums, because of the absence of your normal sidebar (I think) the link “or browse the archives” has moved too close to the the nav bar, screenshot: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6810599/problem2.png
More stuff xD
When viewing the forums the link in the nav bar does not “highlight” as the current link (it does not have a triangle under it and it doesn’t flatten out.
Also I find it odd that every other page on this website has the big footer except the forums. Feels like a consistency issue.
I think return users will be able to adjust to it. Took me a sec to realize the categories were on the right. Personally, I look for categories first.
A new user may get thrown off since your not following the forum look everyone has been used to for so many years.
Ah yes, I much prefer these sort of forums instead of a bunch of categories. Type I’m sure you’ll notice before you read this “And the are back”.
The favicon is defaulting to this
yeah i saw that too.
Favicon is fixed, thanks!
top nav is just a vertical list on my screen (IE7 on Windows XP SP3)
Al
as well, the user id on the left is shifted to the left out of my view, on IE7. this is also occuring on the comment fields on other pages as well
oh well
there seems to be a little bug in Chrome where the content background(WHITE) doesn’t expand fully.
http://i35.tinypic.com/r20mxl.jpg
Yup, gets very annoying after a second…
It seems that you change it to show all of the latest discussion, like archive view. Looks different, but didn’t look like a forum to me. :D
agreed confused me at first. I had to really look to find what I wanted.
I noticed the favicon defaulting too. LT
just got around to having a look at the new forums, wow man.. seriously thats a really refreshing take on a tired old forum format. Really impressed. Is that something you cooked up yourself or is it an off the shelf piece of software? Almost looks like it’s kin to wordpress itsself.
Love the straight forward discussions concept, the auto tracking of your discussions, straight forward tagging system.. Honestly never seen a forum in that style before, god knows why not, it’s a far more familiar to the kind of services we use on the web today..
im gushing.. but hell, i really like it.. would love to know its origins if you’re up for sharing.. cheers
ah seen your post on it, vanilla eh..
ill definitely be checking that out !
Nice job Chris. What are you using to run the forums?
Some bugs in the forums:
* Emoticons are broken, see for example here:
https://css-tricks.com/forums/discussion/comment/17760/#Comment_17760
Post renderes as img src=https://css-tricks.com/forums/discussion/comment/17760/{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif. SMILIES_PATH wasn’t expanded to an actual path.
* Attachments are gone
* Code-snippets have bad whitespace handling. For example here:
https://css-tricks.com/forums/discussion/comment/24920/#Comment_24920
All is dumped in one line. Plus additional escaping is applied there (double). The htmlentities are double escaped causing a php opening to appear like [ampersand]lt;[questionmark]php.
The ‘My Preferences’ option, within the profile page, doesn’t work for me.
It says:
Bonk
Something funky happened. Please bear with us while we iron out the kinks.
Awesome Chris… I think someone already asked this but I’m curious as well, is the forum a WordPress plugin? Or, what’s powering the forum?
Thanks.
Vanilla is powering the new forums.
well the biggest bugg is that the searches r good as dead they r not showing new from searches but still the old phpbb one
and 2nd one that i noticed is that the footer is not whole as it is in the wordpress part
That is intentional. It was like that in the phpBB version too. The footer isn’t necessary within the forums.
any way i love it ts really really amazing and i am weating tell u produce another one of ur cool screecast and show how u did it
well i suppose the search is not a bug u have to wait till google bot shows up and add the new forum in to google listings and discard the previous data
It looks like if you do a general (All) search, then select a forum topic, you get the bonk screen.
Looks awesome Chris, what I would like to know though is why vanilla over phpbb? I run a site that I’m trying to integrate some forums into, and am looking at either phpbb, or vanilla.
i suggest
if u r not an expert like me use bbpress my site forum
but if u are one like chris use phpbb(in that there r way to much complex problems) of vanilla which is more friendlier