New Forums Feature - Teaser

pragma Joined: 05/28/04 Posts: 52

Posted: 07/18/07 16:46:00 For grins, I uploaded some screenshots of the new Forums interface, which is under heavy development at the moment. http://www.dsource.org/projects/tracforums/wiki/Screenshots What you see is the result of having refactored the code to take advantage of a new, custom-built ORM for Trac that I devised. By having a proper object model, I'm able to accomplish a hell of a lot more complexity in the page controller, without loosing my mind. The second screen (Forum Management) is an example of this, where the site admin or project admin can have a lot of control over how the Forum Index looks; each of those buttons works on a post-back to the page, providing immediate control over the layout. The icons are from the "Bitcons" collection. If the red clashes badly with this project, I might be encouraged to changing them to blue, just for Tango. -- EricAnderton at yahoo

Author	Message
pragma Joined: 05/28/04 Posts: 52	Posted: 07/18/07 16:47:41 I'm also thinking of throwing out the validation screens ("Your message has been saved, yadda, yadda...") in favor of the site just intelligently routing you back to where you started. Any takers on this? -- EricAnderton at yahoo
sean Joined: 06/24/04 Posts: 109	Posted: 07/19/07 00:10:37 Looks nice! The differences aren't dramatic, but I think that all improve usability. As for the validation screen, I'd just assume do away with it. The more this works like a 'real' forum the better, IMO.
pragma Joined: 05/28/04 Posts: 52	Posted: 07/19/07 14:52:36 -- Modified: 07/19/07 15:02:49 by pragma -- Modified 2 Times sean wrote: Looks nice! The differences aren't dramatic, but I think that all improve usability. As for the validation screen, I'd just assume do away with it. The more this works like a 'real' forum the better, IMO. Thanks! The idea is to improve usability, while doing some much-needed refactoring. I've been hunting around, taking cues from vBulletin and a few other suites out there. The real impact, aside from forum categories and a few other goodies, is going to be for the administrators and moderators. As this instance of tracforums has demonstrated, a forum really can blossom for a humble software project, so good tools are a must. Thanks for letting me know what you think of those extra pages (the validation/confirmation screens) they'll be history in the next release. Aside from generating ad-impressions (I've seen PHPBB forums that do this), I never really saw a use for those pages anyway. I'll mean less code, less testing, less bandwidth and more impact - A clear win. -- EricAnderton at yahoo