Forum Upgrades

[Pete]

I've just upgraded the forums to the latest version 4.4.x as there was a critical security patch that warranted it.

As usual, there is some pain in upgrading from a 4.x to 4.x branch due to template changes and feature changes/additions so you may find things have moved around a bit.

There is still work to do on the template as this was a little rushed (security update forced my hand) but it should be functional at the very least. If you spot anything drastically broken that I may have missed, please let me know here. Minor template tweaks (fonts, alignment etc) will be updated in the next few days.

[kongondo]

Looking nice even in its unfinished state :-).

One thing now that we have you here (I think I might have asked this before), you know when one is browsing list of unread posts/content, we used to be able to hover on a topic's title in the list and click a button/link to mark that AND ONLY that post as read. That was a time saver! There are times when you just want to mark A FEW/SOME posts as read without actually opening them (?). Are you able to look into this please?

Thanks!

[pwired]

Something looks wrong here. The avatars in the Latest Topics column are stretched out vertically. Also the whole Latest Topics column has moved upwards out of line with the Welcome to Processwire column.

[Pete]

Just now, pwired said:

Something looks wrong here. The avatars in the Latest Topics column are stretched out vertically. Also the whole Latest Topics column has moved upwards out of line with the Welcome to Processwire column.

Yep, spotted those so will look into them as I get time.

[adrian]

Thanks Pete!

Avatars are also stretched in the Notifications panel.

Another thing I noticed is that all out locations have "Location" prepended - eg:

"LocationBuckley, Wales"

[adrian]

Color for "ipsMessage ipsMessage_info" class is old:

[adrian]

Soma and Robin S are missing their avatars - I am sure there are many more also.

[adrian]

Home > Settings - color and icon stretching.

[bernhard]

wow!! new design for the forum, great!! ? 

Avatars are also squeezed in the latest topics links:

[Pete]

Most of the styling issues are where UIKit for the new PW header is conflicting with the forum software styling. I'm actually surprised it broke as little as it has to be honest but will get onto these theme issues in the next day or two.

[teppo]

This is less of a bug and more of a.. well, issue: the line length in the forum is kind of crazy. I'm getting 220-240 characters on a single line, while 100-120 would be good for readability. Would be great to get this fixed as well. I'm thinking that there probably should be a max width for the content area – or perhaps the font size should be double what it is now? ?

The font is also really tiny and way too light (at least in some places, such as the breadcrumbs and other "less important" texts), neither of which really helps with the readability issue.

Anyway, great job getting the update rolled out, and the forum looking more like the main site!

Edit: I'm officially getting old. Setting browser zoom level to 125% or 150% makes things way more comfortable ?

[Beluga]

While the forum is getting some attention, how about disabling the quote tooltip that drives everyone crazy with its evil span insertion ways?

[dotnetic]

New forum look is very clean. I like it, but as @teppo said, the font size is really too small.

[teppo]

Cross-linking this post from Diogo here ?

[dragan]

When you do an accessibility audit on the forum (and the main PW site) there are tons of color contrast failures (among many other issues). WCAG 2.1 states that color contrast has to be at least 4.5:1 for copy text, whereas here most text is below that.

And yes, font size and line-heights are too small. body base font size should be at 16px with line-height 1.6 (unitless, not in pixels). And ideally, all other font-sizes further down should be specified in em or rem.

The main container could be reduced: e.g. max-width 1280px instead of 1630px.

[adrian]

@Pete - maybe you have already noticed this, but https://processwire.com/talk/discover/unread/ has black rather thank pink links.

[dotnetic]

There is a space or colon missing between the word "Location" and the actual location in the user info column

[diogo]

On 3/14/2019 at 3:17 PM, bernhard said:

wow!! new design for the forum, great!! ? 

Avatars are also squeezed in the latest topics links:

I also see this. Solved with:

.ipsDataItem_icon .ipsUserPhoto {
    width: 44px;
}

 

[bernhard]

it's even worse on the notifications tab: 

[dotnetic]

Huh, whats this? Direct messages appear in the activity stream?

[teppo]

@jmartsch, that's a public discussion on Adrian's profile page. So no, not really direct message -- two different things ?

[adrian]

Yeah, I think that was an accident by @bbeer

[Robin S]

On 3/15/2019 at 10:38 PM, Pete said:

Most of the styling issues are where UIKit for the new PW header is conflicting with the forum software styling.

The padding around quoted text is a bit much, as can be seen in the quote immediately above. Seems to be coming from Uikit styles, which I guess are being included in their entirety just for the header. Could we strip it back a bit so only the needed styles are included? Or iframe the header part to avoid the styling conflicts?

Another issue I've noticed since the upgrade: in iOS Safari (older versions) links are triggered on release of long touch (to open the context menu). This makes it difficult to open links in a new tab - you have to slide your finger away from the link before you release in order to select an item in the context menu, or else you navigate away within the current tab. This only applies to Safari and only on older Safari/iOS versions so perhaps it doesn't affect too many people. It's a pretty big annoyance to me though because you cannot select an alternative default browser on iOS (thanks Apple) and I don't want to have to buy a new iPad.

[Pete]

On 3/15/2019 at 2:01 PM, Beluga said:

While the forum is getting some attention, how about disabling the quote tooltip that drives everyone crazy with its evil span insertion ways?

I can't disable many things in the forum software - there's no on/off setting for most of the features sorry.

[Pete]

Fixed a lot of these. I don't really want to change much else as it's a massive pain in the ass when they change the forum templates every other upgrade.

Things like UIKit styles adding big padding on quotes - I could spend a long time tweaking UIKit to just target the header element only somehow I guess but it's easier to just include Ryan's stylesheets and  override a single class (done, padding is now 20px) ?

Accessibility - if someone wants to give me the CSS changes I can just plug in I'd be happy to do so. I don't know enough about accessibility to tackle that myself.

Forum width is same as the site width which makes sense visually, though perhaps we're missing a trick nowadays and could have a helpful sidebar at larger screen widths? Maybe some sort of quick links for docs etc? I'm not sure - it's more work and it's taken me this long just to tweak a dozen styles - I don't get paid for this and have to prioritise client work to pay the bills ?