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site design redux

#1
stryder Offline
I decided that I would take the slight quiet opportunity to try and write a responsive theme for scivillage.com

The idea is quite simple, take the currently terribly themed forum (from a device point of view) and make it better for other devices.  Currently I've not got too far with it, other than looking how how to impliment media queries (to identify different settings for different devices) and a better way of implimenting the forum display.

It's too alpha to push publicly or even make it optional to view however here's a sneak peak at what I've intended.


[Image: responsive_preview.jpg]
[Image: responsive_preview.jpg]


(note: the mouse cursor was added to the image and isn't relative to the size of the images shown. They will be 150px by 150px, three times bigger than the current versions)

The image shows image links to the main forum categories, when mousing over the forum category it will show the last post to the forum. When mousing over the username of the last poster it will show in a tooltip the last post title, who it was by and the date it was posted.

I wanted to just have it that you could mouse over to see what the post was then just click the category or last post title shown to get to the last post. However while this would have been great on PC, it's the other devices that would hate it. Apparently the use of :hover on an (a) anchor is a bit of an issue with devices that could mistake it as an onClick trigger, so I'm having to achieve a work around.

When done I'll have to replace all the background images with higher grade versions and then downscale based upon what requires them.
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#2
stryder Offline
Incidentally you'll notice that General Science has been merged with Science. and the DMZ subforum has been merged with Site-related. This is apart of both the theme in design and simplification of the categories. (There is of course still plenty of forums and it shouldn't effect many links)

hopefully that will be the only major change to the current default theme, I don't want it getting too messed up while creating the new one.
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#3
stryder Offline
As with any design process changes happen, the previous prototype is now completely different. I had to change it since it missed the Subforum title. Current version is still in the process of being developed. I'm currently looking for background images to match the subforums. This is a bit trickier as initially I did this using some images I had and some from the internet, this wasn't a problem so much before since I don't think too many people would of been upset with such a small scale image being replicated.

Currently I'm looking at images 500px by 500px in size which are then being downscaled by the browser to 150px by 150px as background images. The intention here was that if I had the images big enough they would potentially be able to used in different ways at larger sizes.

There is however still the concern of peoples internet connection speeds, the last thing I want to do is bloat the pages to sizes that take ages to load. So I'm going to try to design this to be minimalistic where possible. I'll make sure to include various caching methods to reduce the need to re-download images.
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#4
stryder Offline
At some point I'll have to start looking to HTTPS/SSL integration with the forum. I've kept away from that currently as it's an additional expense currently (While I had a spare SSL Cert, I couldn't use it and Cloudflare at the same time, which means I have to purchase an extra Cert in the future.)

For this reason I do remind everyone, whatever password you use here isn't currently tunnelled via SSL. So make sure what password you use here is different from everywhere else, I wouldn't want using this forum to breach your security elsewhere in anyway. It's not that any breach has occurred as of yet (touch wood) but it's best to be safe than sorry.
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#5
stryder Offline
Slight hiccup in the design I was working on, I figure that it will be too busy with the images (Think of it like a Navy "Dazzle" pattern, it would confuse the users to much to actually be helpful) So I'm going to start another design, I'm considering something similar to the phone theme in how the data is presented, although I'll have a tub of polish with me.
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