ProBoards V5

[Josh Nayayen]

So what with the announcement of the V5 closed beta (which I've signed up for, it goes by PB Support forum accounts so nothing will happen here yet) I decided to try and track down all the new features. This is mostly from one particular list that is hanging around from 2008 and some of the features have crept online anyway, so those are removed. Lines in steelblue are comments by me.

Personal Messages: Conversations
Currently when you exchange messages with another member of your forum va our Personal Message system, each message shows up as it's own item in your Inbox and Outbox. In Version 5, each conversation you have will group together and function more like a thread does. This will allow you to read your entire conversation from one single page instead of needing to go back and look for previous messages.

# of People Viewing Thread
In addition to the current feature which lets you see how many people are viewing a particular board, you will also have the option to display how many people are reading a particular thread.

Password Protected Boards: Remembering Passwords
For those of you with password protected boards, it can be a pain to enter that password every time you come back. If you are logged in (not a guest), once you enter a password for a board it will remember that password for you, automatically allowing access to that board in the future. If the password for the board is changed by an administrator, you will then need to enter the new password to gain access.

Multiple Member Groups
In version 5, you will be able to join multiple member groups. This gives additional flexibility to forum administrators in managing their members -- anything from restricting access to categories/boards, doing mass PMs to different groups, etc. This could be useful to put people into a member group for each faction, letting the staff PM the whole faction.

Sub-sub-sub-sub-boards
There are no limits in the next version on the number of sub-boards any board can have. For those of you who have very complex forums, organizing your forums into many sections will be very useful. Actually visible, organised character sub-boards. End of.

New UBBC tags
[spoiler] ... [/spoiler] - Hides part of your message unless people click on it to display it. Useful for when you want to reveal something (e.g. plot details in a movie) but don't want to spoil it for people if they don't want to see it.

[audio]http://yoursite.com/file.mp3[/audio] - Lets you embed an mp3 file with a player in the post.

Skin variables/conditionals
Variables - These store information that can be automatically inserted into your template, anything from the title of a page to the currently logged in user's name. Each template will have it's own set of variables that you can choose to insert.

Conditional Statements - These allow your templates to display, or not display, information based on a set of conditions. Examples of conditionals:
<guest>This code is only displayed for guests</guest>
<member>This code is only displayed for logged in members</member>

EVERYTHING has an ID
This means we can grab, move, hide, turn upside-down etc pretty much anything.

Integrated chatbox •
As it says on the tin.

[Josh Nayayen]

No one else jumping for joy about the unlimited sub-boards? At least Jerex made a useful suggestion in the chatbox...

pfft, we suck at this OOC board stuff

[Josh Nayayen]

support.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=pbgt&action=display&thread=393645

[Josh Nayayen]

This screenshot wasn't taken by me but by one of the beta testers. It does a good job of showing the default V5 look as well as the layout of the profile etc.

i52.tinypic.com/j7gcuo.png

Now that actual glimpses are emerging, I'll probably update this thread a bit more with interesting stuff like that >_>

^{And feel free to make comments on this. If I didn't want people to interrupt it then I'd have locked it}

[Jerex Talan]

WOOOOOHOOOOO!!!! V5 is coming!!!! V5 is coming!!! Where's my horse. I have to ride to Concord and let them know!

[Birk Snowshadow]

I'm surprised J-rex knew where Paul was riding to. Now the question to determine his salt, how do you pronounce Concord my good sir?

[Josh Nayayen]

Oh look, screenshots...

So I've had access to the V5 beta for a week or so now, so I thought it an ideal time to show you guys what it looks like. It's worth bearing in mind that we don't have an idea of what the admin area (for skins, coding and other sorts of settings) is like yet AND that the skin shown in these is (obviously) the default ProBoards skin.

Also, you might think that a few things look a bit Facebook-ish, but this is simply because parts of Facebook's design WORK and are already widely used around the place (yes, blue is a colour scheme used by other sites too). I don't want anyone to go complaining that it just looks like Facebook (and disapproving of V5 for it) because it doesn't, you haven't used V5 yet so you can't make any real judgement.

Click the thumbnails for bigger pictures.


Posts in a thread
So, this is what a post looks like. The layout is clear and not massively different.

Going from the top of the screenshot, the first thing you'll see (just below the address bar) is the bar with « Prev [1] Next ». This has the functions of the bar that is, confusingly, currently at the bottom of the threads (immediately after the last poster's signature). Things like bookmarking, printing, sharing are all contained in the "Actions" menu.

The next thing worth noting is that timestamps within the past 24 hours are converted to "x minutes/hours ago". This is actually useful, especially as timestamps longer than 24 hours ago are put as the usual date+time.

Finally, the menu I've clicked open. There are...er...the normal functions tidied away in there. Before you ask, no, I don't know what "Select post" is for. You can probably choose to feed the selected posts to a shark or something.


Thread listing
Nothing too out of the usual to say here except that you'll notice the column headings (Created by | Replies | Views) is part of that bar that scrolls down with you. Which is nice.


Main page and recent threads
NO, WE WON'T HAVE TO HAVE THAT BANNER OR COLOUR SCHEME.

But, otherwise it looks good. You can see the new nav-tree/forum jump have all been combined into that one bar. It works well. There aren't any other dramatic changes.


Now, this screenshot is bit different. If you haven't the faintest idea about any sort of HTML/CSS then ignore it. What you want to be looking at here is the box in the lower left. I've got Opera Dragonfly poking around the structure of the page source.

Notice how EVERYTHING has a unique ID and class? I also had a look around one of the stylesheets. It is about 30 times longer than the current one. There was even a class for banned IP addresses (it was simply to give them red font colour). The closest to that we can have currently is change all the text used for title bars (like the info-center). This just goes to show how much more customisable V5 will be.


If you want me to grab any screenshots of specific features or explain what things (appear) to be for/do then say. And don't forget this official thread! ← It's worth reading through the pages in that thread, more features are explained. I might quote those to here later...

[Josh Nayayen]

But how will this make the IE more awesome?

Alex: its hard to see how [V5 will] affect the IE and what we do though
Josh: ooooooooohh. that's just begging for me to answer that
Josh: cancel all my appointments
Josh: I've got an epic list to make

Well, seeing as I shanghaied myself into making a post about this over AIM, I've finally gotten around to it.

So, just how will V5 be beneficial to us? I'll ignore things like the PM threads, working search, direct-access-to-HTML (this is the most awesome for me, especially as I'm now studying software programming which includes a few modules on web design) which will be beneficial for all PB forums because I want to focus on things that will be especially helpful for THIS site. So, here we go:
________________________________________________________________________________

UNLIMITED SUB-BOARDS: relevant for the character sub-boards
Currently there is a limit to the number of sub-boards you can have in a "parent" board and you can only have sub-boards in a main board (those are the ones listed on the main forum page), not sub-boards in a sub-board. We get around the latter by having sub-boards in that board you see below Reference that then link to sub-boards ELSEWHERE that are hidden behind the scenes. We get around the former by conveniently splitting them into factions.
As an example, the current setup is like this:
Forum
—OOC Category
——Character Profiles Board
———Jedi Faction sub-board (placeholder, links to board in hidden category)
————Josh Nayayen "sub-board" (not actually sub-board of the above)

In V5, we can have as many sub-boards as we want which means that we could list ALL characters in one board (although we won't do that because it'd get too long to make sense of). The other important thing is that we can have as many "levels" of sub-boards as we want. Using my previous example:
Forum
—OOC Category
——Character Profiles Board
———Jedi Faction sub-board
————Jedi Knight sub-sub-board
—————Josh Nayayen sub-sub-sub-board

So, in a nutshell, why is this useful?
For members: It means we can organise the character sub-boards in a clearer layout.
For the staff: Simpler way to add sub-boards.
________________________________________________________________________________


MULTIPLE MEMBER GROUPS: relevant for sorting characters into factions
Currently, you can only be a member of one "member group". Pretty much everyone is simply in "Members", with the staff being in either "Administrator" or "Moderator". We could split "Members" into the various factions but it would only be useful for colouring your usernames and the staff couldn't be included (as we wouldn't then have our staff permissions).

In V5, people can be placed in multiple groups. So you could be placed in "Sith", "Canons" and "Members". This means that Kun could send a PM only to the Sith faction characters and you'd get it, but the people in "Non-Faction" wouldn't. Or, we could restrict access to the Sith Academy so that only people in the "Sith" member group can access it. Or, we could hide the point requests board from "Canons" as that doesn't apply to them, but have it shown for "Fanons". We could even create short-term/small-scale groups like "Evading Republic investigation" or "Personal ship thread owners". Being in "Members" also means that you (still) won't be able to replace the Rules with dozens of Nyan cats. Admit it, you've always wanted to do that haven't you?

So, in a nutshell, why is this useful?
For members: You can get information relevant to your faction more easily. You wouldn't need to put in a password to get to your Academy/whatever. You can have some parts of the board that aren't relevant to your character's account hidden.
For staff: Makes it MUCH easier to manage factions. Can make forum less confusing by hiding parts not relevant to accounts that wouldn't otherwise need to get to.
________________________________________________________________________________


MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS PER FORUM: relevant for multiple characters?
Currently, if you have more than one character you have to logout of one account and login to the other. This can be a pain at times.
In V5, you sign in by using your email address. This sign in then covers you for the WHOLE OF PROBOARDS. You simply add your accounts to it and then, when you get to the forum, you simply select which account you want to use on there. For your other characters, you simply click on the "sign in bar" (that thing in the bottom right of the first 2 screenshots in my previous post) and choose which account you want to use on that forum. It's basically the current Global Login but more conveniently integrated in a menu that you can always get to.

So, in a nutshell, why is this useful?
Pretty simple; easier to switch characters.
________________________________________________________________________________


INTEGRATED SHOUTBOX: relevant for the chatbox (duh)
Currently, the super fun-ness place that is the chatbox is an externally hosted chatango one. While it's quite good (hence why we use it ) it's main drawbacks are that it can't match EACH skin and (especially) that you need to register a chatango account to use it properly.

In V5, the forum comes with its own chatbox. This is obviously going to take its styling from the skin you are using. It also is integrated with the forum so each account on the forum, when signed in, appears in the chat as that account.
Although, it does have a little disadvantage:
— It doesn't constantly auto-refresh: It will only do that for 10 minutes (IIRC) after you have posted OR clicked the refresh button. This means that while having conversations normally isn't a problem, you can't always leave it open in another tab while you spend hours writing a post like this. (This is why I'm not overly sure if we'd us it, it's TBD later).
A PLUS side though: It doesn't use Flash so it's faster to load and will always load for devices that don't have Flash such as phones (when I was in the US earlier this year, I could still post here on my phone but it was irritating missing out on the chatbox).

So, in a nutshell, why is this useful?
For members: Less hassle of signing up to chatango. Faster chatbox.
For staff: More control over chatbox (as it's part of PB).
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If I can think of more things, I'll add them to this list.
As before, if you want to know about something in V5 (what it's like/can we do xyz?) then let me know

[Josh Nayayen]

This was shown off while I was away so I'll post it here now.

The one most staff would be using to tweak stuff is Level 2. The only person we'd really want doing stuff in Level 3 is me, because it's very easy to break the forum with that.

To convey the level of improvement here; this is what we use to change the skin colours and this is what we use to add codes in.

Feb 21, 2012 15:37:47 GMT -5 @ryan said:

The theme area in v5 is broken into 3 parts based on level of skill. Here's some screenshots to give you preview of what's coming.

Easy Theme Creator (Level 1)
No screenshots, sorry. What I can tell you is that it is ridiculously easy to use. You simply pick a simple palette from a selection and apply it to your theme. There are a few more options as well as customizing the simple palette if you want. Takes about 30 seconds to make a theme this way.


Theme Properties (Level 2)
More complex than v4.5, but more organized and easier to use. This is more advanced than the Easy Theme Creator and you can customize down to every single element. You also set things like permissions for your theme here. This is meant for the main management of your themes.

The settings tab and a shot of the theme manager that appears everywhere.
The style editor and preview window.
Showing how every detail is editable live in the preview window.
The new images page.
Showing how easy it is to add images.
Editing groups and ranks per theme.


Template Modification (Level 3)
Definitely for advanced users only. Template modification gives you access to the actual DNA of your forum and lets you make changes. Coding skills required.

The template management page.
Inside a template.
Direct CSS editing.

All of these areas are still being worked on and changes have already been made even since I posted this. Lots of renaming and simplifying is still going on so don't worry if it all seems like a lot. There are also additional things not shown in the screenshots (like importing and exporting themes). I'll try to answer any questions anyone has.