UseBB Community

Analogue to the UseBB 2.0 planning thread.

The current website is more a seperately developed system that only integrates with UseBB at some small parts, such as an active topics listing.

As announced there will be a new website for UseBB 2.0. Currently planned:
- integrate with UseBB 2.0;
- the forums will be embedded in the website;
- a wiki (probably DokuWiki) will be added to the website, eventually using UseBB's member database;
- templates/mods/translations/etc database;
- (similar to UseBB:) new colour palette;
- liquid design(?).

The colour palette is not completed yet, and will probably remain secret until the first release. Using a liquid design is a choice based on the popularity of liquid/fixed designs on forums. From my experience a liquid design is mostly more popular and fits better for a community website. Note UseBB itself will probably remain fixed by default.

Comments, suggestions, etc are very welcome.

For the wiki, there are only four candidates: DokuWiki, ErfurtWiki, PhpWiki and PmWiki. The software needs to be free, PHP based and have MySQL authentication possibilities.

http://www.wikimatrix.org/compare/DokuWiki+ErfurtWiki+PhpWiki+PmWiki

Any ideas?

Hmmm, well I don't think you could use Duko, from there it says it doesn't do mySQL, or any databases for that fact. Erfurt looks good though, has a plugin for most things, but PHPWiki has more usability, and is XHTML compliant, so i think Erfurt looks good if you're not worried about compliancy and major usability.

Dokuwiki uses plain text files but it supports authentication over MySQL (required for a shared UseBB login).

The other ones are quite unknown to me. I'll try them soon.

liquid xhtml/css layout are very hard to do unless the layout is very very simple. even if you do get it to work, it requires many hacks, i say you stick with a static width.

if you plan on using tables for your layout, that's a differnt story.

Liquid xHTML/css layouts are easy to do, the only problem is that it can become ugly if the space gets greater or smaller than a certain amount but you can solve that by using (min-width en max-height, so called fluid layouts).

fluid layouts are simple if you know what your doing

A fluid layout would be nice. I am not a fan of fixed width (big monitor over here), I just don't see the point in all the wasted space.

Note, UseBB itself remains fixed width by default.

I love the current design.
Would it be possible to get the design files after the new website is public?

The current design is under the GPL and distributed with UseBB. The next one will be GPL too, and available via SVN once it is ready.

Great,
Thanks a lot Dietrich

Dietrich wrote

Note, UseBB itself remains fixed width by default.

Shouldn't the width be controlled with percentages and not pixels ? I did that to v1.6 and tested it up to 1280x1024 and it appears to be rendering quite fine.

Either way, it would be very easy for someone to alter the width from a pixel to a percentage ( or reverse ). I personally like a fixed width to work with. I'm on 1280x1024, and it looks fine fixed .

Looking around at what's on offer theme-wise, there's not very much available to gauge anything against, and what is available; is mediocre to say the least.

It would be wise to have a development team for this software; then priorities could be shared by those who have more expertise in the different aspects of forum software. Code-Programmers generally compile lousy theme structures and expect the theme makers to work with it.

I went to edit the above and it appears that I'm out of time.

The Default theme here is a good example of the above. It looks great, but it's not practical to try to turn it into anything other than the default structure.

I've sent you an email to at least give you some idea of what I do, or would like to do with useBB.. So take lopalong off your hit-list.

The discussion around a development team has been held before, see http://www.usebb.net/community/topic-post7147.html#post7147.

I certainly know how to write a usable default theme, the problem is UseBB 1's default one never used all CSS possibilities (as said couple of days ago), and is already nearly three years old. Compared to other forum software, we have a very decent default theme with strict separation between content and markup, so it's not that bad.

Also, you aren't obliged to use the default theme to create your own, as far as I know nobody has ever written a template from scratch. If you do so you can write the HTML and CSS how you'd like to.

Comparing UseBB 2 with v1 is not a good idea, there's a difference of nearly four years experience between them, and both packages differ in nearly all aspects.

Dietrich wrote

Comparing UseBB 2 with v1 is not a good idea, there's a difference of nearly four years experience between them, and both packages differ in nearly all aspects.

So where is UseBB2 may I ask ??

Not available publicly yet. See the roadmap.