A new PGD

**crackmeal** · 20-02-2009, 07:20 AM

First of all, I'm glad that this forum exists. Rock on!

Unfortunately, I'm not fan of the new look for more reasons than I have time to mention. Here's my beefs...

1. Way too bright... my coder eyes are strained enough. I can't abide white backgrounds and neither can most other coders who sit for marathon sessions. I'll be back once in awhile to check for the addition of some dark SMF themes under "Look & Layout". Please?

2. The logo reflection (egregious design clich?© #1) is inexplicably skewed... so it manages too look bad while simultaneously being physically impossible. Howabout a design competition to get something pro up there? Something simply not in Helvetica could give the site a little bit of branding back.

3. The gloss effect (egregious design clich?© #2) in the site header is mysteriously bowed. Yowzers, that's a lot goin' on.

4. The hover effect in the site menu removes the background shading. This is unecessary and distracting.

5. The old site design had a lot of flavor. It was instantly recognizable, unpretentious, and it just felt "lived in". By comparison the new default theme is like a dentist's office.

Please take these criticisms as encouragement. Long live PGD!

**NecroDOME** · 20-02-2009, 07:38 AM

I like the new look

!! Nice work!

**chronozphere** · 20-02-2009, 09:27 AM

You guys did a great job. Thanks

There are a few things though i'd like to see / improve:

> The old set of smiley's looked way better. These are very blurry. Is it possible to replace the images by the old ones?
> I really miss the "view latest posts" feature, because i click it every time i visit PGD. Any chance you can add this?
> As allready mentioned, it would be great to have [pascal] blocks back again.
> And an optional dark theme would be nice too.

**AthenaOfDelphi** · 20-02-2009, 09:49 AM

Just going to throw my $0.02 into the pot for all those who don't like the new look.

I've just switched one of my sites from using a heavily customised theme to one of the 'out of the box' ones provided with the software... the reasoning was simple... I dreaded upgrades because every upgrade broke my theme and the customisations I'd added. Now I don't worry. Using an off the shelf theme with minimal tweaks makes my life easier. Whilst the old PGD theme was great, it was (I think Will will agree) a maintenance nightmare because it was so heavily customised (like a lot of the behind the scenes code, such as the article system), this meant the board was running old code because it was such a pain to upgrade.

So, on that front... Big up for Traveler and Savage. Great job guys.

As for this is wrong.. that is wrong... there's no theme with x... no theme with y... it's kind of like the comments that crop up about a lack of content... I want more tutorials... I want more of this... I want more of that...

Well... here's the thing see... this is a community site.

There's nothing stopping you creating a theme and sending it to Traveler or Savage. They may not use it. Then again... they may be glad of the help. Everytime this kind of comment comes up, it gets my goat because there are a hardcore of people Will, Traveler, Savage to name a few who keep the site running for the rest of us, but they can't do everything. So if you want to see more articles... why not write one? why not contribute news? why not organise competitions? why not contribute a theme? a new logo? Don't just say these things and throw it open to the 'community' to fix.

I want to see PGD grow again, but that will only be possible if more people contribute... I try to... admittedly I've not been around much, but there are a few articles with my name on and I have from time to time resolved some server issues, so I feel justified in saying this kind of thing.

I love this site and I like a lot of the people who hang out here, so lets help build it up again and return it to what it was a year or two ago.

Your community website needs YOU!

**AthenaOfDelphi** · 20-02-2009, 09:56 AM

Originally Posted by chronozphere

You guys did a great job. Thanks

There are a few things though i'd like to see / improve:

> The old set of smiley's looked way better. These are very blurry. Is it possible to replace the images by the old ones?
> I really miss the "view latest posts" feature, because i click it every time i visit PGD. Any chance you can add this?
> As allready mentioned, it would be great to have [pascal] blocks back again.
> And an optional dark theme would be nice too.

The 'view latest posts' has been replaced on the forum header with 'Unread posts since last visit' and 'New replies to your posts'. I'm not sure where exactly these are available yet, but they are certainly on the portal home page and I think they do what the latest posts finder did on the old site.

As for a dark theme...

Savage/Traveler: If you guys haven't got one in the pipeline, if you PM links to the SMF, TinyPortal and the theme version thats are installed, I'll setup a dev copy on my system at home and see if I can come up with a dark theme. If you have got one in the pipeline, is there anything I can do to help? If not, how dark do peeps want it? Black or just dark grey? or both?

As for articles if you guys have the articles system running (but hidden from users), let me know if I can help with anything, like putting my old articles back on. Or possibly a [Pascal] block parser. I'm sure I'll be able to make a few spare hours this weekend.

**savage** · 20-02-2009, 10:54 AM

We would like to migrate the old articles section into more of a wiki look and feel so, does anyone have any experience with either TikiWiki or PhpWiki as they are easily installable from CPanel? Suggestions for other Wiki software?

I'm fairly sure the old smilies can be added to the SMS images folder to replace the standard SMS ones. I'll wait for Traveller's return, just in case I mess up something.

**Legolas** · 20-02-2009, 11:31 AM

I like this minimalist style, but at this time it is a bit harder to read for me (I'm a bit short-sighted). I would prefer some more contrast in colours
About the wiki, I'm feel very comfortable with MediaWiki, the one used for Lazarus and FPC wiki.

BTW, great job!

**Ñuño Martínez** · 20-02-2009, 12:44 PM

I'm impatient to see the wiki with articles.

Who will be able to write articles on the wiki? I have an article about voxels I wrote to Pixelate a long time ago and I did partially translate it to Pascal. I know it's a bit obsolete but it's sooooo retro-style, and I really love retro-style :3

**savage** · 20-02-2009, 01:51 PM

Originally Posted by ?ëu?±o Mart??nez

I'm impatient to see the wiki with articles.

Who will be able to write articles on the wiki? I have an article about voxels I wrote to Pixelate a long time ago and I did partially translate it to Pascal. I know it's a bit obsolete but it's sooooo retro-style, and I really love retro-style :3

I actually think voxels should make a comeback. It's main issue has always been processing power and memory and we have loads more now than when the first voxel engine were running on 468DX266's. I'm waiting for someone to write something kool with voxel for Xbox or PS3. Check out Voxlap if you get the chance.

Anyway this is slightly off topic.

**arthurprs** · 20-02-2009, 04:18 PM

maybe next week you guys can try a theme like this one
http://custom.simplemachines.org/the...php?lemma=1236
better contrast and not *BRIGHT*

the old phpbb smile set looks better

, i use them on my board

ps:
my smf forum, https://sitia.kinghost.net/~thehardwaresxtreme/forum/
i'm having a issue with DNS and the main domain www.thehardwaresxtreme.com is not working