Differences between the old and new version of phpbb & proposed changes

neptronix

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Hello folks. This new version looks quite a bit different than the older one, so i thought i'd give you some pointers on how to deal with the changes.

There are a few new themes. Right now, the default theme is a modified version of SE_square, called SE_Square_NX.
There is also a variant of it called SE_Square_Left, which puts the user profiles and info on the left hand side, much like facebook.
Prosilver is of course, the phpbb3.2 version of the classic theme we've been using all along.
Milk_v2 is a theme we are still working on, but has a more modern look.

To change your theme, here are your steps:

View attachment 2


change theme 2.png


Also, 'view new posts', 'view unanswered posts', 'View my posts' etc are now in a different place in this version.

new stuff.png


If there is anything truly broken about this new system.. please let me know here, and i will address it over the coming days.
 
To add a picture, use the "Attachments" tab at the bottom and Add files. You can add multiple files at the same time. Then they will show up in a list where you can insert the inline. Large pictures should automatically resize finally.

You can also drag a file from another window or your desktop into the text box and it will add the file to the list.
 
Feels waay different, gunna have to get used to it. Did switch to prosilver, but cant move the fixed L and R borders. Milk makes the forum full page, full window. Am liking da milk theme
 
It's 2017. More emoticons! :twisted: Or is that not possible with this program? The last one was the cute "bunnypancakehead"

:mrgreen:
 
Dauntless said:
Wow, you added a border. That's what this upgrade was for?

The good news being it's still mostly the old board, which always suited me just fine.

How about you not troll me on my thread any further? thanks.
 
Good work neptronix! This place was in need of a lick of paint. Is the Tapatalk plugin working correctly, since I'm unable to logon to the Sphere through the mobile app?
 
What is the best tutorial on creating / modifying themes, for this specific version of PHPBB?

None of the themes are really usable for me, as they either waste way too much screen space or don't respond properly to font sizing (both of which force me to keep scrolling both sideways and up and down just to read things), or have other problems.

The only option I can see to let me keep reading, helping, and posting frequently is for me to convert the old subsilver2 theme over to work on the newer version, or create my own theme that will function usefully.


If there's no way to do this, I can't see me doing a lot on here anymore, since among other problems, if I leave things sized so that screen elements are normal, the font is so small I can't even tell there are letters. If I enlarge the font enough to read things easily, then screen elements are gigantic. Smilies in the box (on the right rather than left, which is incredibly annoying) are bigger than my pinky nail. Other images also enlarge, like inline/attached images in posts become so huge I must scroll around to see them, or I have to greatly reduce font size until it is basically just dots so I can get the images to fit on screen.

This did not happen in the old version--images remained the same size, only the font size increased.

That was using subsilver2 on the old one. Presently I am trying to use the theme SE Square Left because it at least has *some* things on the left that need to be there, and it still has something resembling the bluish background that made it easier for me to read, alternating shades between different posts.

I tried the Milk v2 theme but cannot use it because it is all white. (it also has the same problem of images changing size with the text)


Using Remove It Permanently I can at least get a small part of the useless junk that is part of various pages out of the way of actually reading the page, but it doesn't work the same way as it did with the previous PHPBB version, so I have to redo all the RIPs I already spent a lot of time doing originally (and all the Adblocks I used to remove images/icons/etc that also get in the way, take up space, or are just distracting). Unfortunatley a number of space wasting elements (that mean I have to scroll around more, or make text smaller and less readable to fit the page on screen) cannot be removed via RIP because they are "outside" the stuff I need to see, so if I RIP them then the whole page disappears.

Same problem with other borders and stuff--and also, all of that stuff resizes with the text, making more wasted space. Everything on the page ought to stay the same size *except* for the text when the font+ and font- functions of the browser are used. But the themes of this new PHPBB don't follow the rules, and are problematic because of that.

One huge waste that can't be fixed without changing the theme itself is the search box--it's stuck inside the waste-of-space header box. If I remove the box so I don't have a couple of inches of wasted space at the top of every single page, forcing me to scroll down that much more to read stuff I actually want to see, I lose the search box. Of course I can open the page by typing in the URL instead, or using an external desktop shortcut, etc., but it's beyond annoying that it's now an element inside an unwanted element inside an unwanted element etc. (the old version I could RIP individual items, so if I didn't want to see Active Topics, I just ripped the link and it was out of my way, etc.).

Apparently I also can't adblock all teh little useless icons like the "contact" or "top", etc., because they aren't actually images. So they're in my way too--they can't be RIPped out because they are individual elements in eveyr single post on a page, so you ahve to RIP them on every single post on a page. Similarly the icons for all the links at the top can't be removed, because they are also not images--they are part of the actual linkword, so I can either remove the whole link (which I need) ilke "private messages" etc, or I ahve to leave teh whole thing there.

(keep in mind I am not normal; I am distracted, sometimes to the point of being unable to read, by little things like icons sitting around in teh wrong place; after years of using something I can sometimes eventually get past that, but I'm nto really willing to spend years relearning the new appearance--it'd be easier to just come here and post on my own threads and forget the rest of the board).


Anyway, I could keep listing broken things, but AFAICT the only way to fix the problems I have is to get the old theme back, or make my own, either way it means I'll have to learn how and do it myself, as long as an admin here is willing to upload what I build to the server (even if it's just the old test server) so it can be tested and used.
 
Another issue (though only visible in some places) is that even if you turn off viewing avatars in your UCP, the page is still being fed to the browser with them, slowing down the page load. (I just adblocked teh whole avatar URL so taht doesn't happen now, but I shouldn't have to).

In some places, like in a forum or thread / post list, it will still show avatars, in teh "last post" column.


I can only easily block the images that are stored on ES--a number appear to be stored on members' own sites and I have to block those individually, each time one appears.

More wasted time that could've been spent helping someone instead of being distracted by stuff that wasn't a problem before.
 
Something that appears to be genuinely broken, and not just be being the one wierdo in the group:

Clicking a link in a post (sometimes) or a signature, etc., to something else on the board, be it a post, a UCP page, etc., takes you to a "logged out" stateview of the page. with the forum default theme and unreadable text size, etc, and a "log in" link instead of a username in the bar on teh top.

YOu are not actually logged out, because if you go "back" with the browser button (or backspace key), and reload the page you came from (where you were already logged in), it'll still show just like before, and you're still logged in as you, according to the bar at the top.


The difference I can see in the URL bar when this happens is that there's a session ID added to the URL in the logged-in version of the pages vs the links clicked on from a post or a signature, etc.

So, for instance if I click on the link my signature to go to my trike thread
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833
it takes me to an unlogged-in view of that.

If I click on the link generated in a page like "view your posts"
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833&sid=0fa1ea2b52a3f00036485746ce183955
*OR* if I paste teh session ID to the end of the unlogged-in-view-URL and then go there, it will view it normally as me being logged in.


So the board now REQUIRES that all URLs have your current session ID number appended to them to be able to view them as logged in. Meaning, all internal ES-forum links in every post that has one, are now "broken", since they:
--won't view the way the user last set things
--won't allow you to reply
--won't show anything not available to logged-in users.
--etc.
*until* the user goes back a page, copies the
&sid=0fa1ea2b52a3f00036485746ce183955
portion of the URL, goes forward again, pastes that onto the end of the URL now in the URL bar, and clicks GO or presses Enter, etc.

Basically it's going to look to the average user like they just got logged out, and they'll log back in, click on the link, get logged out, log back in, click on the link, get logged out, and then eventually give up and go away since they can apparently not stay logged in to reply or post.

This problem does not appear to apply to any *generated link*, so if they're clicking a reply button or whatever in a page they're already "logged into" it works fine. It's only if they click one of the bajillion existing links in a post or signature, etc., or any locally-stored shortcuts on their computers, that they will be unable to post or reply or "remain logged in".


Previously the only part of PHPBB that did this was the ACP; I'm assuming that still works the same way here, but it is not necessary for the regular user part of PHPBB and is going to cause user-problems and waste moderator and admin time (and other members once they start figuring it out and trying to help) as people bring the problem up over and over and over again (because that will never stop as new people run into the issue).


Hopefully there is a way to turn this session ID requirement off, so that existing links within posts/etc are no longer "broken".



Note that I do have cookies enabled, and this whole domain (both as www. and plain) endless-sphere.com is set to allow all cookies.

Logging out (with teh board-gnerated link for this) and back in doesn't change the behavior.
 
Another wasted space problem:

Instead of the previous version's simple little "spacer" with a membername in it, now the board uses a big bar with
"(membername) who is currently on your ignore list, made this post.
Display this post. "

Part of the point of using the function is to be able to just visually skip past those, and it's pretty hard to do with this jumping out at me from within a big empty bar of space. :roll:

The old version could've used even less space than it did, but the new one is way worse about it.

One more thing I hope I can fix with my own theme for the board....
 
Another problem:

When I'm in the Subscribed threads list in the UCP (which is where I get to everything from), with the window at my usable width on screen at a usable font size, it rearranges stuff on screen so that it no longer has a link to take me to the latest reply of each thread. I have to middle click on the title of the thread instead, or the last page number of the thread, and go there instead, then find my way down to the last post. :/


The rearranging stuff on screen when resizing fonts /etc is also hugely annoying, because it should leave everything where is, just make the font size bigger or smaller.

Whatever they did to this version of PHPBB really screwed up the user interface royally.

:cry:
 
I like it :)

The AEVA forums recently got an upgrade so I;m fairly familiar with this new platform.

Nice work guys!

Chris
 
It's amazing how much better the new phpbb works on my Android phone.

The ability to ebike forum on the train or the toilet. Now that's what freedom means to me.
 
amberwolf said:
The difference I can see in the URL bar when this happens is that there's a session ID added to the URL in the logged-in version of the pages vs the links clicked on from a post or a signature, etc.

So, for instance if I click on the link my signature to go to my trike thread
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833
it takes me to an unlogged-in view of that.

If I click on the link generated in a page like "view your posts"
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833&sid=0fa1ea2b52a3f00036485746ce183955
*OR* if I paste teh session ID to the end of the unlogged-in-view-URL and then go there, it will view it normally as me being logged in.

Yes, actually we were wondering what was up with this last night, but after 48 hours of working on this system, i needed a break.
Wasn't aware the problem was so severe tho.

I looked into this and there were some settings related to cookies that caused www.endless-sphere.com to act like a separate site. phpbb3.2 needs diffrent settings.

I believe i have fixed this. Try logging out and logging back in, and see if you can get the problem to occur again.
 
danielrlee said:
Good work neptronix! This place was in need of a lick of paint. Is the Tapatalk plugin working correctly, since I'm unable to logon to the Sphere through the mobile app?

You're welcome.
No, we do not have tapatalk installed at the moment. The main reason for this upgrade was to make things usable on mobile.
Since i browse ES with a desktop only.. can you let me know what tapatalk does for you that the upgrade does not do?

I would prefer to avoid adding another layer of complexity to an already complex system.. but if tapatalk is really important, i can bend.
 
neptronix said:
amberwolf said:
The difference I can see in the URL bar when this happens is that there's a session ID added to the URL in the logged-in version of the pages vs the links clicked on from a post or a signature, etc.

So, for instance if I click on the link my signature to go to my trike thread
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833
it takes me to an unlogged-in view of that.

If I click on the link generated in a page like "view your posts"
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833&sid=0fa1ea2b52a3f00036485746ce183955
*OR* if I paste teh session ID to the end of the unlogged-in-view-URL and then go there, it will view it normally as me being logged in.

Yes, actually we were wondering what was up with this last night, but after 48 hours of working on this system, i needed a break.
Wasn't aware the problem was so severe tho.

I looked into this and there were some settings related to cookies that caused www.endless-sphere.com to act like a separate site. phpbb3.2 needs diffrent settings.

I believe i have fixed this. Try logging out and logging back in, and see if you can get the problem to occur again.
When I click on one of the above links, it takes me there with a "login" button on the screen instead of my user name. Still broken?

The themes still need a little work, IMHO. I don't like the colors (or lack thereof) with milk, but all the other themes only use half my monitor width (centered, at least). Milk lets me use the whole monitor width, but I'm not so fond of the drink that I want my computer screen to look like it's covered with it. A little color is a good thing.

Overall, I like the new look of the other themes, but please fix the problems with width. I have a big monitor, it's a shame to only use half of it.
 
amberwolf said:
What is the best tutorial on creating / modifying themes, for this specific version of PHPBB?

There's probably no such thing. You need an intermediate to advanced level of knowledge of CSS, Javascript, and HTML in order to even start working on these modern themes. They are very complex. I do web development for a living and some of the CSS styling threw ME for a loop. What you see with the default theme is a result of me spending a few days ironing out flaws in PHPBB 3.2's default theme. Out of the box, things look horrible. Sounds like it needs more massaging.

Do me a favor and hunt down a theme you can tolerate on phpbb's site and let me know what your selection is. I will install one theme just for you, rather than spend days of my own time tweaking the main theme..
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/prosilver/demo/3.2#
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=581

None of the themes are really usable for me, as they either waste way too much screen space or don't respond properly to font sizing (both of which force me to keep scrolling both sideways and up and down just to read things), or have other problems.

The only option I can see to let me keep reading, helping, and posting frequently is for me to convert the old subsilver2 theme over to work on the newer version, or create my own theme that will function usefully.

I've heard a few complaints about font size by now.. I believe it may be possible to bump it up a hair in many areas. This is a job for me next week.

As for your other complaints.. there is no way to get this system to work exactly like the old one. The responsive themes which shift things around to fit mobile, ipads, and desktop will mean that the look will be a bit different no matter what.

(keep in mind I am not normal; I am distracted, sometimes to the point of being unable to read, by little things like icons sitting around in teh wrong place; after years of using something I can sometimes eventually get past that, but I'm nto really willing to spend years relearning the new appearance--it'd be easier to just come here and post on my own threads and forget the rest of the board).

Well, we know that by now :mrgreen:
Just keep in mind that i have 40,000+ other members to make happy as well. I am going to have to balance amberwolf's needs with the needs of everyone else. You're going to have to accept some differences in how new phpbb works because any forum owners who aren't upgrading to this new version are losing their readership to facebook and becoming ghost towns due to lack of mobile compatibility. In fact, that has already happened here to a degree.

I am willing to work with you, but let's tackle big problems first. Find a theme you can tolerate and let's get that installed.
 
Strange. When I clicked on one of the links from another thread to come here, it didn't have the problem (still shows me logged in), but when I click the links from amberwolf, it's as if I had logged out. Refreshing didn't make the problem go away.
tanstaafl said:
neptronix said:
amberwolf said:
The difference I can see in the URL bar when this happens is that there's a session ID added to the URL in the logged-in version of the pages vs the links clicked on from a post or a signature, etc.

So, for instance if I click on the link my signature to go to my trike thread
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833
it takes me to an unlogged-in view of that.

If I click on the link generated in a page like "view your posts"
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67833&sid=0fa1ea2b52a3f00036485746ce183955
*OR* if I paste teh session ID to the end of the unlogged-in-view-URL and then go there, it will view it normally as me being logged in.

Yes, actually we were wondering what was up with this last night, but after 48 hours of working on this system, i needed a break.
Wasn't aware the problem was so severe tho.

I looked into this and there were some settings related to cookies that caused www.endless-sphere.com to act like a separate site. phpbb3.2 needs diffrent settings.

I believe i have fixed this. Try logging out and logging back in, and see if you can get the problem to occur again.
When I click on one of the above links, it takes me there with a "login" button on the screen instead of my user name. Still broken?

The themes still need a little work, IMHO. I don't like the colors (or lack thereof) with milk, but all the other themes only use half my monitor width (centered, at least). Milk lets me use the whole monitor width, but I'm not so fond of the drink that I want my computer screen to look like it's covered with it. A little color is a good thing.

Overall, I like the new look of the other themes, but please fix the problems with width. I have a big monitor, it's a shame to only use half of it.
 
tanstaafl said:
When I click on one of the above links, it takes me there with a "login" button on the screen instead of my user name. Still broken?

The themes still need a little work, IMHO. I don't like the colors (or lack thereof) with milk, but all the other themes only use half my monitor width (centered, at least). Milk lets me use the whole monitor width, but I'm not so fond of the drink that I want my computer screen to look like it's covered with it. A little color is a good thing.

Overall, I like the new look of the other themes, but please fix the problems with width. I have a big monitor, it's a shame to only use half of it.

Sigh, i actually discovered that there is a second layer here.
If you are on HTTPS:// and click a HTTP:// link, the system will forget the cookie. The www.endless-sphere.com vs endless-sphere.com issue is fixed, but HTTP versus HTTPS acts like a different site.

Working on a patch of phpbb3.2 for this now... what an annoying bug!
 
Okay, there seems to be no civil way to fix this http/https cookie forgetting issue, so i patched phpbb's code so that it rewrites urls like:
http://www.endless-sphere.com to http://endless-sphere.com
and
http://endless-sphere.com to https://endless-sphere.com.

When you link to the site in the future, don't use www.endless-sphere.com or http://. use https://endless-sphere.com.

I understand that this is a hard habit to break, so the system will overwrite you even if you write the URL wrong :)

Note: i did not add this URL rewriting code everywhere. There are many places where it might not actually need it.. If you ever see the system mysteriously forget the fact that you're logged in.. please let me know where / how you got to that part, and i will correct it there as well.
 
Okay, more than a few users have complained about font sizing.
I have bumped up the font sizes in the areas that matter most. This only affects the main theme ( se_square_nx ). Other themes are not affected.

You will want to hit shift-F5 to refresh the new CSS files in order to see the change.

Let me know what you think..... if the fonts are not large enough, i have to do a complete overhaul of our main theme.

As for full screen / fixed width complaint, i am not sure what to do with that yet. I also have a super wide screen, but prefer the restricted width. Once the main theme ( se_square_nx ) is dialed in, i will probably do a "profiles on the left" variant and a 'full screen' variant if enough people want something like that.
 
neptronix said:
There's probably no such thing. You need an intermediate to advanced level of knowledge of CSS, Javascript, and HTML in order to even start working on these modern themes. They are very complex. I do web development for a living and some of the CSS styling threw ME for a loop.
Then I'm probably screwed.

But I have found that I can learn to hack stuff I don't want out of something without necessarily knowing a lot about the something in question, though it frequently breaks things at first, and I have to keep going back to figure out what I last did that didn't create the problem. I don't necessarily have to learn how to write the code itself, just a bit about what some things do, which I can sometimes do simply by experimentation. (I learned a lot about hacking the Windows registry this way, and with XP was eventually able to slim a system down to be as responsive as it would've been if it were Win98 or better, so that it didnt' require multiple massively-expensive computers just to do the CPU/RAM-intensive realtime manipulation of music and 2d/3d art stuff that I was doing then (still do the music now).


So...I'm still willing to try to fix it on my own, if I can set up a test bed to do it. I guess the first thing I'll have to learn is how to setup a PHPBB board and do mods to it. Or actually, the first thing is probably what kind of server it has to run on, so I can build up a minimal computer to do that here, out of the various computer junk I have. Then I can do whatever I need to to copies of the theme until it does what I want and doesnt' do what I don't want.



What you see with the default theme is a result of me spending a few days ironing out flaws in PHPBB 3.2's default theme. Out of the box, things look horrible. Sounds like it needs more massaging.
I'm not sure "massaging" is a sufficiently eloquent term, but yeah. ;)


Do me a favor and hunt down a theme you can tolerate on phpbb's site and let me know what your selection is. I will install one theme just for you, rather than spend days of my own time tweaking the main theme..
https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style/prosilver/demo/3.2#
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=581
I'll see if there are any that actually function usefully, but if they are all mobile-adapted, then none of them are really going to work right simply because of the zoom functionality (which I realized is what is causing the main problem I have of all screen elements resizing instead of just the fonts). Probably will take me at least a few days to go thru them, depending on how many they have.

FWIW, I don't expect any of the main themes to be "fixed" ;) just for me (and any of the few others that have similar problems to me), but I'm hoping that if I can hack up a theme to do what's necessary that it can be installed as a choice for anyone that has problems with the mobile-"enhanced" themes.


As an aside, I really don't understand why so many developers of so many types of technology think that forcing unnecessary "features" (that often break functionality necessary to existing users) on existing users is a good idea. When there are options, like with PHPBB and it's board styles, to keep an "old" version of functionality around, I'd've expected the developers to do just that--let the old stuff still work, or at least to keep a theme around that emulated that, without the problems that stem from specific new functionality. Unfortunately, in pretty much almost everything I've ever worked with, it's not how they do things, even when it wouldn't cost extra development time to do it that way (based on conversations with various developers during beta testing of different types of products).



I've heard a few complaints about font size by now.. I believe it may be possible to bump it up a hair in many areas. This is a job for me next week.
Personally, I'll need a lot more than a hair (as will other visually-challenged readers). I'd have to compare the default size to the size I use, but I think I'm using a size at least twice as tall/wide as the default. I forget how many zoom levels that is, maybe 5 levels? But in my case I *only* want the text of posts/pms, etc, and the titles of threads in a list, etc., to be resized, *not* any of the board's elements or text. Basically, just the user-input-data, not the board-generated stuff.


As for your other complaints.. there is no way to get this system to work exactly like the old one. The responsive themes which shift things around to fit mobile, ipads, and desktop will mean that the look will be a bit different no matter what.
The "responsive themes" is a big part of the problem, unfortunately. I know it can't be made to do exactly what the other did...but if it could be made to *not* do what the new one does would go a ways to help. ;)

Really, I'm posting these issues in hopes, not expectations, that there might be an existing fix out there that's easy for me, or you, or someone, to do. Not that you'll have to work for hours, days, or weeks to make just a handful of users happy out of a couple of thousand.

If I don't say something, then you can't even know there's a problem to fix. ;)

(Side note: most of those "40000" members are either long gone, never even came back to read or post, or were just spammers--I bet that if you removed all zero-post members that haven't visited the board more recently than a year ago (in case there's some that might still come back), it'd cut the number of "members" in half, at least--probably even further.)
 
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