I've got a question, and I'm wondering if anyone can give me a few answers and suggestions.  

How can I make E-Blah better?  I'm not talking about new features, but rather cosmetically.  I've done a lot of changes over the past few months to E-Blah cosmetically (including the XHTML 1.1 stuff).  However, I'd like to make it look more appealing to people, especially people who want to make really good looking themes.

Also, I'm wondering if anyone has ideas on how to advertise E-Blah.  More than anything, I think we just need some good set advertising.

.........

Also, as a side note, I've been looking into it, but it may be a bit far fetched, but I've got a little bit of E-Blah running off of MySQL.  Specifically, the Members database and the message logs.  It doesn't work without flaw, though, and it's certainly not optimized (after it's all done, without optimization, I'd probably say it'd use over 50 queries per run, which is overkill  ).  Furthermore, I've not even began to finish fixing everything to use the database for the members database (though, I must say, centralizing the reading/writing of the current database has helped a LOT in the process ).  That said, I'm not sure if I should press into it further (because it'd have so many bugs).  On the flip side, I was also going to make it use SQLite, which works off of a single file (instead of an actual database server).  I'm really not sure it's ever going to be fully done though ...  

i think overall this is a great package at the moment and does the job but to make it more appealing praps something like this maybe
http://www.ibunique.com/forums/index.php?&&CODE=00
but that is just for visual effect i spose

I think on some pages (ie. Post page, Member center, etc.) you should not have a fixed width. Like for example in the member center there is a few things in there where the width="700" (I think it was in there)

Reason being is, because I had to go in and modify that to 100% to get my forum to not stretch cause I wanted the width like I have here: http://www.flameage.com/forums/Blah.pl?

AND MYSQL? You are keeping a flat-file version right?

SQL - NO NO NO

I recommend E-Bblah because of it's flat file feature.

The only thing I believe would benefit E-Blah now is an easier template creator, I'm working on one but I'm pushed for time and compared to you, I'm just a novice.

a thought on the advertising. one of the things i am always on the look for is quality links. i have tried the link farms and mostly is the spam type sites. if somehow a link exchange could be done with the forum. that would not only help eblah but also all the sites that use eblah to rank higher in the search engines. this would be real helpful to the ones that are trying to make some money off their websites. afterall eblah is easy to set up easy to add the ads.

just my thoughts

Quoted from turbomad1

i think overall this is a great package at the moment and does the job but to make it more appealing praps something like this maybe
http://www.ibunique.com/forums/index.php?&&CODE=00
but that is just for visual effect i spose

Yeah, this would be just a template thing.  Does look good though.  

I'm not sure what you mean, Jesse.  The pages should be 100%, unless it's search or something.  Those pages would look aweful at 100% though.  

Template creator.  Hmm.  The only problem would be when there's new CSS variables and all.  I'd need a good concept proof to go by, I think, to understand how it'd work.  That is a good idea though.

jimw -- link sharing would be fine with me.  I just need some people who want to, that doesn't have ads that are just horrible looking.  I also wouldn't want to advertise a site that they themselves would never draw traffic here, you know.    Also, a lot of those link sites do more harm than good to your PR.

As for the SQL stuff ... SQLite doesn't use a server, it uses files.  It can be faster than MySQL, at times (or so I've saw and heard).  There's no way I'd allow E-Blah to be driven completely off of files, because I know many don't have SQL servers (and actually, broken SQL links are farily common).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite

In MemberPanel.pl

Code <table cellpadding="5" cellspacing="1" class="border" width="700"> <tr>   <td class="titlebg" colspan="2"><strong>$profiletxt[93]</strong></td> </tr><tr>   <td class="win smalltext vtop" rowspan="2" style="width: 180px; padding:0px;">$profile{$viewuser}</td>   <td class="win2 vtop">    <div style="font-size: 25px; font-weight: bold;">$memberid{$viewuser}{'sn'}</div>

I changed the width="700" values on some of them to 100% and they look fine on my site now...

I will add it to my list.

Dont know how it would work with the perl; but if there was a simpler way of linking up the eblah members database with other logins and pages on a site would be really good.

I've been aiming at having a shot at tieing up my forum with the rest of my site; but other than the lack of time, it would really impede me if I wanted to upgrade the forum after then, because of differences in the member database. Maybe there is a way to make it backward compatable? or some API that we can query the eblah.pl file to send back what we need, xml? The option of using an sql, or sql lite version of the mdb might help in this?

The width=700 thing; could you add a variable into all of the pages to take a width, % or px, so that in the forum settings it can be set and we wouldnt need to look through the source files? (Slows me up upgrading..lol)

Regarding the template creator; would it be possible to query the eblah.com server for an up-to-date list of the css classes; and then using DOM put a text box for their value; and then saved temperarily for like a preview board index; confirmed then to be saved to the template file?

Advertising --> create a wikipedia article (thought you had one, but just looked today, and there aint!)

We did have a Wikipedia article.  They deleted it because it was "advertisment".  Kind of strange though, as other forums on there had the same layout and all.    If someone wants to recreate it, that'd be nice.

I've been thinking about making some sort of API's.  Not sure if I will yet, though ...

Well, I for one would appreciate more freedom when it comes to appearance. For example, I didn't like the cosmetical changes that you made recently. I don't hold it against you or anybody, since I might be part of a minority and you'll have to decide in favor of the majority. But that's where skins should come in: Let every member have it the way they want.

I know that you're already going in that direction using CSS but you'll not be able to control for example the order of the items (avatar, rank, stars, etc.) in the info panel next to the posts. I know there's boards that'll let you change all that via templates (where you'd insert something like <!PPD!> at the place where you want the posts per day to show). I know that this is a lot of work, but it would provide a lot more flexibility for those doing skins.

The only other thing that I find kind of annoying is the way the mod system works (it being so version-dependent), but I guess there really isn't any way around this issue because of the way eblah is structured.

However, it's still the best board I know, so keep it up Justin!

I agree with Jesse about the widths... and Opfer about the template thingy.  The 'printed' html should be COMPLETELY seperate from all aspects of design.

What would be completely awesome is a function to execute php includes in the template.  I saw this done once... not sure how hard it is to do.

Quoted from Opfer

Well, I for one would appreciate more freedom when it comes to appearance. For example, I didn't like the cosmetical changes that you made recently. I don't hold it against you or anybody, since I might be part of a minority and you'll have to decide in favor of the majority. But that's where skins should come in: Let every member have it the way they want.

I know that you're already going in that direction using CSS but you'll not be able to control for example the order of the items (avatar, rank, stars, etc.) in the info panel next to the posts. I know there's boards that'll let you change all that via templates (where you'd insert something like <!PPD!> at the place where you want the posts per day to show). I know that this is a lot of work, but it would provide a lot more flexibility for those doing skins.

The only other thing that I find kind of annoying is the way the mod system works (it being so version-dependent), but I guess there really isn't any way around this issue because of the way eblah is structured.

However, it's still the best board I know, so keep it up Justin!

You can easily reorder those by editing Load.pl.  The order is actually in an array, so all you've got to do is move around one word.  

You can't use PHP, but you can use Perl in the templates.    I've thought about doing the other template question, but I'm not sure it would ever be used, and would require a lot of recoding.  

Quoted from Justin

You can easily reorder those by editing Load.pl.  The order is actually in an array, so all you've got to do is move around one word.  

Well sure, it would be pretty easy to do mods to set everything up the way I like it, but it has two disadvantages:

1. I force every user of my forum to have it the way I like it.
2. Upgrading to a new version is hell already with just 3 mods.

Hmm?