First I haven't been able to be active on here as much since I have been very busy lately as well as dealing with losing over 70GB of data, apps, and content from one of my workstation's harddrives going bad. My computer is still not full setup for graphic or web design, I am still missing or haven't found the installs for quite a few of my design apps. I am even using a temporary install of Windows XP to use the computer until I can really take the proper time to redownload, setup and config everything right back to how it was before the incident.

Over the last few days since I got my computer running again, I have been putting quite a large amount of work on the SectionGWG Community Forums that I run since they are seeing much more use than they were in the past. While making new custom graphics, tweaking settings, and uploading content to match the content for the forums, I thought about a few simple requests for the E-Blah software. They are minor requests in that they should not take very long to implement and I would make them myself if I knew where to edit the files.

I am pretty sure that they cannot be done with the current version of E-Blah by default anywhere so here are my few requests and they are in no particular order.

---

1: Give us the ability to customize the Message Icon categories and the icons themselves so we can add, remove or make new ones. This are the message icons such as News, Thumbs Up, Warning to list a few. Maybe enable a folder from where the forum can gather the names of the graphic files and use them to update the message icon list as a possible way to do it. This way it would be easy to add custom ones and remove those that we don't use on our board.

2: Give us the ability to use graphics for the forum poll results as an option that we can enable, instead of how it is right now through using just html code. I remade the bar.gif image located inside blahdocs/images and replaced it with a custom one and it didn't change it at all. That was when I realized that its probably not graphic-based at all. All it would need to do is search and load possible a poll_left, poll_fill, poll_right, and possibly poll_background to the background and they display the calculated number results above it. Should be pretty simple to implement just not sure where to look.

3: After using that handy script to generate smilie packs that I found on this forum, I have been creating and testing different smilie packs on my boards. This one is actually two related parts but one of them may already exist and I just overlooked where to edit it. The first is to give us the ability to add or remove smilies to the main Add Smilies... table that displays to the left of our main text box while using the New Thread \Reply to message. This is not because I want to go crazy and add tons of smilies in this area, but it would be nice to add a couple new ones to that area and have it adapt its size as needed.

The other came about after adding a decent number of various smilies to the Add More Smilies Popup Window, I noticed that all the optional ones are just clumped into one massive list. It got me thinking about how to sort and organize all the extra similes and then I though it would be nice if we had the ability to Add Categories for the optional smilies to use such as Animated, Humor, Positive and Negative just to list a few options that I came up with. I was playing around with naming my smilies manually to use a system like that but then thought it would be better and easier to manage if its was part of the smilie code. For the revised Add More Smilies Popup Window, all it needs to do is display the smilie category name and have a space or two seperated the categories that we have made beforehand.

---

That is the end of my list some simple features that would be nice to have for E-Blah and see in a future nightly build. By the way Justin, I really like how the calander and portal have been redone and cleaned up in the newer nightly builds. I am looking forward to the next official release of this great forum software and take care now.  

#1 and #2 are actually really good ideas.  I could add the poll stuff to CSS so it can easily be changed.  I'll add these to my list of things to look into / implement.  I'm not sure when I'll be able to look into it though.

- Justin

Hey Justin, glad you like those first few ideas and always love how things are coming along for my favorite forum software. I found another minor request while working on overhauling and customizing my SectionGWG Community Forums that I thought you might want to take a stab at.

If you have visited my forums lately, you will have noticed that, after user feedback, I have started using graphics in each of the main categories and boards on the main board index using the Board Image feature. While most of them now use my icon size of no larger than 38x38, I use a few categories that have subforums and I cannot add a board image to them like I do with the others since that feature is not available. I have also used your tweak to hide the subforums from listing on the main board index, but it looks odd with the custom graphics for each of the other main category but missing from those that have subforums.

I don't think it will be a big deal to add it to those categories like you have done to the rest of them. Thanks again for listening to us users and continuing to make E-Blah even better than ever. I am really looking forward to the next official release of E-Blah; some of the new stuff and revisions from the nightlies are real nice.

Hmmm, that's because categories do not accept images though.

I've added the mod you wanted with the message icons.  You can now:

1) Add new icons, delete them, rename what they say, etc.
2) Allow only certain member groups to use certain icons (such as Administrators can only use "News" icon).
3) Assign groups to the icons (that'll show inside of an <optgroup>).