Some of you may recall I had hoped to launch the new website over Easter. It didn't happen. Too may Easter Eggs
We are about two weeks out - I'm aiming for April 13/14th. The more geeky of you can go visit the building site. Just put this in your computer's hosts file:
95.211.222.96 sydenham.org.uk
If you do this you will need to add www. to get back to the live site. This (blue) forum is at http://www.sydenham.org.uk/forum/. If it ain't blue don't post!
What's a hosts file? If you need to ask it better you wait till launch day. I'll update you here. Those that get there will see two of the six sections are mostly complete. When that's done we start on the other four.
I took a quick look. Immediate impression; like the current site, only in monochrome Doubtless a more thorough investigation would have revealed improvements.
On my iPad - still the nasty old mobile version. I made sure to click through from the new home page (which looks great).
I'd still like to use the classic version on my iPad. My bookmark for this takes me to a blue forum page with no header. I am posting from that blue page now.
I'm planning to use this mobile theme (click preview button): http://www.artodia.com/phpbb-styles/mobile/
It will automatically detect whether you are using a mobile device. However, first I need to hack the code to put in a classic/mobile selector 'cos mobile can be anything from a 3" to a 10" screen.
Am now on the monochrome forum by following that link. Now a new query - viewing on a MacBook Pro with retina display, the headers on the forum pages are fuzzy, like non-retina supporting apps - the tabs and the top and the bit that says Sydenham Town Forum and the sub heading. Everything else on the forum pages is retina-sharp. BUT, on the Town Centre home page, EVERYTHING is retina-sharp.
The header on the Forum is different to all the other site headers. It is an image and I'm guessing that your browser is resizing it and doing it badly for a high-res display.
The other headers are pure text & css and so don't have a resizing problem.
I had to do it that way as I spent weeks trying to graft the Wordpress header generation into phpBB. There was a clash in the CSS. The only solution I could find meant building a completely custom css which would be sure to be broken with any major update in either Wordpress or phpBB. Not a place I wanted to be.
There may be another solution. How serious is it?
The browsers on my Webos & Android devices do it perfectly (the Android AFAIK is a higher resolution than the retina display). Can you try another browser? Other device reports welcome.
It's not serious - I can read the text fine, if I want to use the tabs. It just doesn't look very nice. I'm guessing that this will only be a problem for a very few users when in the desk top version. Retina iPad users will presumably migrate to the spiffy new mobile site when available.
leenewham wrote:Great to see all the local blogs together.
Which ones did I miss? http://sydenham.org.uk/blogcentral/
Its slow loading as SE23.COM is down atm and its hanging about waiting for 10/15 secs to be sure ...
"Fifty Shades of Grey" is apparently popular at the moment. For those of us well past the first flush of youth the light grey text is slightly uncomfortable to read.
chrisj1948 wrote:For those of us well past the first flush of youth the light grey text is slightly uncomfortable to read.
Good point. I'll try and darken it a little for the extracts under the pix on the frontpage and the body content of the pages. Something close to the body text here on the forum.
The desktop site is designed to work within a 1048 pixels width (the minimum for the last decade or so). Apart from the Forum the site will gracefully collapse to mobile phone size. That was the key to using the current theme.
A cost of this was the Forum could not use the same 'collapsing' code. Instead I created an image map that is, to the desktop user, superficially identical to the rest of the site. But, and this where things go screwy, it is actually two image maps. Hence when the width gets smaller some browsers will wrap them instead of compressing them. If it was one image it would probably work for most browsers most of the time.
Why two? Well its down to Town Museum & Art Gallery. Folks have posted some terrific images over the years of the Crystal Palace and Sydenham. Many are much bigger than your screen. So after many requests the Forum software was modded to reduce any image over 700 pixels wide to display within the Forum posting (you can still display the original high res copy of course). There is a posting at the top of the Museum about this. A consequence of this is the header image cannot be more than 700 pixels wide. So what we have are two images of about 450 pixels wide. Which can wrap.
The next step which I hope to complete within a week or so is to get a better mobile version of the Forum up for those who wish to display in less than 960 pixels. As to a 'proper' solution of having a non image mapped header - that is, atm, beyond my css coding skills. I have laid down a challenge to one member of this forum to try and do better ... anybody else with skills in the direction is very welcome to have a go. Just drop me a PM.
When I open the website fresh and am in the home page, I'm always looking for the forum tab in the light grey tabs. The black band of tabs at the very top sort of disappear, like they are a border or part of my browser tabs. Having two sets of tabs on each page is a bit confusing. Either the tabs at the top need to be more distinctive or the internal nav tabs on the home (and other pages) need to be different (maybe running vertically as thumbnails rather than a bar of tabs?).
The aim is to get you to click directly on a Forum post in the right hand column of the frontpages which should be the easiest and fastest way to read stuff in the Forum (one click instead of three). The top menu is there just there for reference and not to distract you - which appears to be achieving its aim
Can I ask why you think the dominant clickable right hand post list is failing to attract you?
Three possible reasons:
1. Knowing the old website and how to navigate that, I was straight away looking for the top tab. Someone new to the site hold probably scan the page and notice the right-hand column.
Doubtless a more thorough investigation would have revealed improvements.
