Our new spring look

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Moderators: Bob the Hamster, marionline, SDHawk

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Mogri
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Our new spring look

Post by Mogri »

If you've been paying attention, you probably noticed some slight tweaks to the site over the past week or so. If you haven't been paying attention, well... surprise! Welcome to the new Slime Salad forums.

Those of you on the allgreen theme (Soda_piggy and some less-frequent members) have also been forcibly converted to the new style. If you hate it, the option to switch to allgreen or the old theme is still available in your profile. But you should stay on the new theme, because not only am I not going to continue supporting the old themes, but you'll also be missing out on the existing features of the new theme. These exciting features include:
  • Mobile browser support has been vastly improved. No more horizontal scrolling for smaller viewports, and no need to keep pinching the screen on your phone.
  • In the desktop version of the site, the left nav flows with the page for easier navigation (unless your browser is too short to fit it all in the first place).
  • In the mobile version, the nav starts out collapsed so you can more easily get to the part of the page you're interested in.
  • Link visibility within posts has been dramatically improved. It's now much easier to distinguish links from other text, especially relative to the old theme.
  • Spoilers are now inline (like this).
  • You can click on spoilers to toggle permanent visibility on and off. (This is especially handy for phone/tablet users.)
  • Images too large for your browser are scaled down, so no more horizontal scrolling when someone posts a massive image.
  • You can double-click an image in any post to view it full-sized.
  • Every form on the site has been revamped to bring it up to standards. This means, among other things, that you can click on checkbox/radio button labels. There are lots of other minor improvements in this vein.
  • The forum presentation is generally cleaner, de-emphasizing a large amount of phpBB cruft and providing better readability.
  • The forum HTML is much better-organized and no longer consists of a jillion tables. This makes maintenance is much easier for me. (I'm personally very excited about this, even if you aren't.)
Obligatory FAQ

Why?
A few reasons.

When I opened up the site, I knew basically nothing about the web. I did what I could at the time to make the site look good (which essentially consisted of handing the look and feel over to Fortis, who did a wonderful job with graphics and so forth), but it's still pretty obviously been the default phpBB theme with a coat of green paint for nearly ten years now.

Today, "web" is pretty much my job description. Not so secretly, Slime Salad has been my workbench for web toys since day one, which is why you get things like the Arena, Mega Tact, Brood, and more, including several you don't know about. This has largely meant that the forums themselves have received little of my attention over the years, but my name is still attached to the site, and outside of the front page, this is what visitors are most likely to see when they come by. So there's a professional interest for me to have it looking good, and it's also good RWD* practice.

Speaking of RWD, there's another reason: most forums are nearly unusable on the phone. Slime Salad is very much desktop-driven, since it is home to hundreds of desktop-only games, but browsing on-the-go is a real thing that people do, and so it's something I wanted to make easier along with cleaning up the forums.

What happened to gamelist tags?
Game tagging is still coming! Revamping the interface was not a necessary prerequisite to tagging, but it does make it easier for me to make interface changes such as tagging in the future. I hasten to add that I will not be maintaining the other themes -- only this new one will support tags.

I found a broken thing and/or I have a suggestion. What do I do?
I've been using the new theme for a little while now, which is enough for me to conclude that it provides basic usability. However, the way I use the forums is not necessarily the same as how you use the forums (not to mention that there were some features that I was unable to fully test). Please report any bugs or suggestions here.

I hate the new theme, much like I hate you, the other forumgoers, and existence itself. Can I change back?
Yes -- the option is in your profile settings -- but I'd really rather you tell me what you'd like to see changed.

*Responsive web design. I could explain this, but it'll be quicker if you just resize your browser window.
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Spoonweaver
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Post by Spoonweaver »

My god....


Suggestions:
Updated Main page
Gamelist placed on side panel
Last edited by Spoonweaver on Fri May 15, 2015 12:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

THIS IS AWFUL. I WOULD SHOW SCREENSHOTS WHY IT IS AWFUL, BUT I CANNOT FIND THE BUTTON TO UPLOAD A SCREENSHOT.
Attachments
And I had to edit the post three times to get to this. What the slime is the deal with this? Please tell me my browser is just ill-equipped for this slime. I do not see an "Upload image" button on here. I gotta hit submit and then edit to add anot
And I had to edit the post three times to get to this. What the slime is the deal with this? Please tell me my browser is just ill-equipped for this slime. I do not see an "Upload image" button on here. I gotta hit submit and then edit to add anot
SSNewLook3.png (51.91 KiB) Viewed 5700 times
Bottom is clean, organized and tidy. I can easily look at all the boards. Top is bloated, ugly and insane. Why do I have that tab of stuff?
Bottom is clean, organized and tidy. I can easily look at all the boards. Top is bloated, ugly and insane. Why do I have that tab of stuff?
SSNewLook2.png (139.94 KiB) Viewed 5649 times
No clean division between posts, can't tell who the slime is talking, just generally unorganized as hell
No clean division between posts, can't tell who the slime is talking, just generally unorganized as hell
SlimeSaladsNewLook.png (74.59 KiB) Viewed 5677 times
Last edited by Gizmog on Fri May 15, 2015 12:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Bob the Hamster
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Post by Bob the Hamster »

I like it! I like it a lot!
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Mogri
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Post by Mogri »

Gizmog wrote:THIS IS AWFUL. I WOULD SHOW SCREENSHOTS WHY IT IS AWFUL, BUT I CANNOT FIND THE BUTTON TO UPLOAD A SCREENSHOT.
Yo Giz, clear your cache.

The redesign works in IE, FF, and Chrome. I haven't tested others.
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SDHawk
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Post by SDHawk »

I cannot stand the constant sidebar. Can we please get a variant (or ideally make this awful constant sidebar a variant) with a normal header instead? Switching back to the old isn't really an option if it's unsupported.

Edit: Also uh...there doesn't seem to be an option to logout anymore?
Last edited by SDHawk on Fri May 15, 2015 12:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Mogri
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Post by Mogri »

SDHawk wrote:I cannot stand the constant sidebar. Can we please get a variant (or ideally make this awful constant sidebar a variant) with a normal header instead? Switching back to the old isn't really an option if it's unsupported.

Edit: Also uh...there doesn't seem to be an option to logout anymore?
I'll add a control to toggle the sidebar.

Logout has been added to the sidebar.
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SDHawk
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Post by SDHawk »

Nice! Diggin' the new look outside of that.
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Master K
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Post by Master K »

Woah, holy crap.

I leave for a friends house, come back, and suddenly Slime Salad is all shiny new
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kylekrack
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Post by kylekrack »

It's definitely all more modern and fresh. I don't think the sidebar is a bad thing, cause it makes it way easier to navigate everything, but I do find it more comfortable to offset my browser so the posts and stuff are in the middle. It's easier to look at when it's centered. I've worked with HTML and found it difficult to make that work, but if you have can easily do that, or at least make the sidebar a little bit narrower, I would recommend it. Of course, I'm just throwing ideas out, but I actually quite like how this all is, especially with the bigger font.

Also, is there a gradient on the green boxes that hold the actual text and stuff? I can't tell, but it looks really nice and I'd like to get the same look for my own website.
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Mogri
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Post by Mogri »

There is a slight gradient on nearly every background, to the point where I feel like I might have overdone it. It's only really obvious on the main panes, though, and the subtle gradient is nice.

The relevant styles are in newstyle.css; you can do it without external assets.


In other news, I fixed the problems with the preview pane.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

Looks way better now that I'm in a better browser! Sidebar is a little big for my tastes and doesn't have a lot of stuff I'd usually want to click: A listing of the forums (and whether or not anything was new on that forum) would be more useful to me than Front Page, Search or Memberlist, but it looks really really nice.
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FnrrfYgmSchnish
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Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

Not a fan of the ever-present sidebar sitting there and taking up obnoxious amounts of space; will have to look for that option to hide it. Glad that option exists because otherwise I would definitely be switching back to the old layout forever. (Where is the don't-show-the-giant-sidebar option anyway? I poked around looking for it just now and it doesn't seem to exist yet.)

Also, when I first tried to switch back to the old layout I kept getting error pages whenever I tried to load any part of the forums... though that seems to have been fixed now (...otherwise I wouldn't be typing this. XD)

Sidebar prevented me from forming much of an opinion beyond "ugh, who stuck that huge thing there!? why!?" at first, though. Will have to check out the new style again after I've managed to find the hide-sidebar option so I can form an opinion that isn't shifted way, way into the negative range by that sidebar.
Last edited by FnrrfYgmSchnish on Fri May 15, 2015 4:21 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Gizmog
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Post by Gizmog »

Yeah, the longer I look, the bigger the sidebar seems to get! It fills.. maybe a quarter of my screen. That's a lot of real estate dedicated to "stuff you might wanna see" and pushes the stuff I do want to see weirdly off to the right.
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Sparoku
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Post by Sparoku »

Not so bad once you get used to it. :)
"One can never improve enough nor should one stop trying to improve."
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