Version 5 (really soon)

[Josh Nayayen]

Oh hai everyone!

So ProBoards V5 has an actual release date now: April 29th, 2013
We can also upgrade earlier from January 25th if we want to (April is when conversions will take place if you haven't already upgraded [edit: we can now delay until the end of 2013 if we need]). When I left, I said I'd take care of the upgrade to V5 and I still intend to. I'm now pretty familiar with V5, so I thought I'd start on it.

An important thing to note is that I'm not planning to make it look exactly the same as the current V4 version. As a starting point, this is a test site of mine I was using to try out some things for V5. It gives you a rough idea of what the basic V5 look is.

What I'd like to know is what parts of the current site people really like. I'd guess that things like the lightsaber menu should be kept. Is there anything you'd really like to see added? Should something be done differently? Whether you can think how/if it would work, or if people would like it, doesn't matter; suggest anything.

I'll post updates occasionally to get your opinion and, likewise, post things that you like too (doesn't even have to be from a ProBoards site or even a forum at all). If you have any questions about V5, I'll answer those too.

[Thon]

Hiya Josh!

Well, at the moment, you know what I want added. I'll add more as I think of things though, so expect this post to be heavily modified in the coming weeks!

*Update*

Okay, here is one. Could we have the chatbox off the side (i dunno how the spacing would work on this), and when we scroll down, like on the homepage, it's always visible, instead of just being at the bottom?

[Josh Nayayen]

Jan 13, 2013 18:26:09 GMT -5 Thon said:

Okay, here is one. Could we have the chatbox off the side (i dunno how the spacing would work on this), and when we scroll down, like on the homepage, it's always visible, instead of just being at the bottom?

This could be done, although there is the issue of spacing like you said. We could have it so that if your browser window is big enough it would automatically show at the side. There is the question of whether or not we switch to the built-in chatbox for V5 or keep the current one. The advantage in this situation for the built-in one is that we could easily do that.

One problem which is really irritating is the addition of a new advert which takes up quite a bit of space at the bottom. I took a gigantic screenshot so you can see the whole thing. I'm looking into what we can do with it for now.

[Thon]

What about having it just stay on the bottom, and keep up the screen like that? I'm about to head home, and i'll post more things in about 15 minutes.

[Josh Nayayen]

Some other things to think about:

Enable Like System: Example. We could make this only be on the OOC boards if we wanted. You don't have to use it. We can turn it on or off.

Page After Registration: When someone registers on the forum, we can send them somewhere first. We could send them to the Rules thread?

Navigation: We can add custom links to the navigation menu (currently the lightsaber menu). Not sure if there's anything we'd want to put there, given the space they'd take up. Plus, if we kept the lightsaber, we'd need new images for each OR pester Caius to give me the blank lightsaber images

Board Descriptions: I'm planning to use a plugin I made to do this sliding/fading descriptions thing. I'll go with fading them (I think) but someone will need to do proper descriptions for them.

[Thon]

Interesting.

Okay, I was thinking about having a navi bar, possibly vertical off the left side, with drop down menus to quick navigate to each board, and the sub-board.

Sorry for taking longer then 15 minutes!

[Josh Nayayen]

Jan 15, 2013 17:21:56 GMT -5 Thon said:

Interesting.

Okay, I was thinking about having a navi bar, possibly vertical off the left side, with drop down menus to quick navigate to each board, and the sub-board.

Sorry for taking longer then 15 minutes!

The normal V5 nav tree already does that and, while I could try and make it vertical, it works quite well at the moment. I've started tidying up the BetaZone copy so I can start trying things out later this week.

[Josh Nayayen]

Hey everyone, a little update here.

I talked with Caius on AIM this morning and we've got a couple of things sorted in terms of what we're planning to do. First of all please note that all of these are subject to change. I won't be sharing any screenshots or specifics of what Caius has made; I'll let him do that here if and when he wants. Finally, I might have missed something because of AIM's stupid web client not saving logs clearly.

The plan is to have a similar number of themes (V5 term for skins) to what we have now. The same sort of selection will be available and the colour schemes won't be dramatically different from the current ones. The banner style will be changing from the current style to something similar to the ESB-style banner we used for the 5th anniversary. Some themes will have slightly different ones from this, but rest-assured that they all look great. The backgrounds have also been changed up to some new ones. All in all, the initial versions I've seen look really good and make the forum look a lot more modern.

For the main menu, we're still working out what to do with this. We'd like to keep the lightsaber menu but we need to work out how to deal with the (very useful) notifications. Any suggestions on what to do for this will be welcome. We will still have a similar, all-in-one look with the menu and navigation tree combined together. In order to tell what account you're logged into, we're going to have your avatar shown at the end. This is where we'll be making the most use of V5's "layout templates" where we can easily move around parts of the page and get data from elsewhere. This is a rough idea of what this may look like.

The icon set in V5 is much smaller now so the few that are left will be updated. For the "no/new posts" icons next to each board, we're planning to change these to something other than a large icon. Be it a smaller icon on top, a tag shown at the side, or a coloured bar next to it; this is still being worked on.

Shown in the screenshot for the main menu, the general title bar style will be a simple, clear style similar to what we have now. There is a lot less clutter on these in V5, so they really look tidier. We can also easily adjust what borders are shown which should make things look tidier too. For example, this is what V5 has by default, and we're planning to reduce it to something like this.

If there any comments/suggestions/etc from the above or if you have any other ideas, as always, post them right here.