How to Make E-Blah Better - Print Topic

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  :X).  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 ...  :P

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.  :P  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. :P 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. :P 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.

to 1. Using templates, every user could select the theme he likes the most (stuff like order of the info panel would be theme dependent).
to 2. You could make sure that a new version of Eblah still supports the template scheme (impossible with mods, since you don't know who has done which mods, and even if you did, it would still be impractical).

As being said, I know that it's a lot of work, this is simply the ultimate disconnection of logic and design which would provide complete flexibility to theme authors.

I would like to see something where you can have a global header and footer across all themes.

For example, I have a webring navbar on my site. In order to have that navbar across all of my themes I had to edit each theme, where if there was an option for global headers and footers I could have just inserted the webring code in the global footer secton and all of the themes would have that change automaticially.

Quoted from Fryedsoft

I would like to see something where you can have a global header and footer across all themes.

For example, I have a webring navbar on my site. In order to have that navbar across all of my themes I had to edit each theme, where if there was an option for global headers and footers I could have just inserted the webring code in the global footer secton and all of the themes would have that change automaticially.

I really like this idea too. It would make it much easier to customize the template. Of course it would mean everyone would have to change their templates again >:(

Quoted from Jesse

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...

Done.

Quoted from mealybar

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.

This may sound a bit basic, but it works! I wanted to setup a member database on an online meditation site we run on http://www.meditacionmundial.com so I linked our forum on
http://www.sanacionysalud.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl? to the above URL.

To use the meditation site, you register using a nested table on
http://www.meditacionmundial.com/register.htm

Once they´ve registered, they login to the med site using login board created for it on
http://www.sanacionysalud.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b-meditacionaudio/ which can only be accessed by registered users.

The board only has one post on it which says "access meditation here" and when they click on it, there´s a URL redirect code in the post to the hidden audio page on meditacionmundial. I´ve been told I can even set the hidden page to only accept requests from the login URL on the board but I haven´t got round to that yet... :-/

Sounds long winded, but it´s actually quite seamless for the user and you can use it to create logins for other sites, such as one we´re building for online courses.

Hope you find it useful!

Quoted from Justin

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.

Well, if it´s any help, I´ve always worked on "the more you give, the more you get"  :)...
My board started as an info site where I gave free advice, and has now grown into half a million clicks a month with 125,000 posts but the spinoff is that most of our students now come to us as a result of visiting the board. They appreciate the info given and as a result, go on the courses we offer.

one idea would be to offer free installations on large traffic sites in exchange for advertising space in the board.

There are alot of "traditional" non net companies out there who want to set up a way of interacting with customers but don´t know how to go about it.

More and more newspapers, for example, are setting un Boards on their sites and TV stations too so viewers can exchange views on the programmes they watch. Soap operas have quite a cult following on alot of TV websites through the use of boards. They all have a high content and traffic  factor.

Go for media sites like those, send them an email with examples of your boards and statistics (how many boards are installed - google brings up 269.000 results for blah.pl  :o :o :o) and the offer to do the install in exchange for ad space.

Hope this helps!

Quoted from Martin

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.

I Think so. I'm also here cos offlat file system. The SQL can cause character problems or fath related errors and it's weird that cant be fixed in most cases expecially in host moves.

I believe that flat file is the cornerstone in E-Blah.
Otherwise there are a lots of alternates.

And 'ı'm in the forum now to understand and define how many of people syncron and how many forum entries can flat file system handle? And does it cause a CPU or Disk overhead

I agree with Opfer on keeping the theme structure the same throughout each release. I am currently working on a theme designer in VB .NET 2005 and am basing the theme generation on the X Theme from Eblah 10.2.5. It would be nice if the theme structure could stay the same because then I wouldn't have to update the theme generation each time a new version came out.

You can view my post on the template editor here: http://www.eblah.com/forum/m-1172292826/

By the way, I recently found a video that demonstrates the concept of separating content and design in a quite impressive way.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Quoted from WannaUse

I Think so. I'm also here cos offlat file system. The SQL can cause character problems or fath related errors and it's weird that cant be fixed in most cases expecially in host moves.

I believe that flat file is the cornerstone in E-Blah.
Otherwise there are a lots of alternates.

And 'ı'm in the forum now to understand and define how many of people syncron and how many forum entries can flat file system handle? And does it cause a CPU or Disk overhead

E-Blah closes things out right, the DBI modules work a lot better (or simpler, maybe) than those of PHP, which many programmers are just sloppy or messy when writing with. You'll often see \' or something similar in PHP applications but you'll not see it in E-Blah.

E-Blah runs fine with either.

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