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General Call to Action Thread: January 2016

Vekseid

Most imposing inkwell.
Administrator
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
This thread is to highlight a few things that could use some attention. Please give it a read.



First, as many of you know, this site is kept up by subscriptions from members such as yourself. If you enjoy this place, and can spare a small bit, please consider supporting us on Patreon or Paypal. Subscriptions have been dropping off lately and things are getting tight again.

Please keep in mind the first two rules - if money is tight for you, do not donate money.

Thank you for your support, everyone. : )



The following is important. After the forum software is upgraded, this will no longer be so trivial.

As some people are aware, one of the moderators had her e-mail address get compromised a few months back, and the hacker used this to get access to her account and go on a mass post-deletion spree. While most forums and posts were restored, many still remain deleted. I made a mass restore script to restore all deleted posts in a forum, as well as one for individual members.

If you want me to hit the 'mass restore' button on your posts, please send me a private message with the request.

Understand, this will restore everything you have deleted, so you may want to go back and delete some of your posts.

Again, this will only be possible for a few more months. If you want me to do this, please let me know.

If there are individual threads you want restored, and know their titles, DarkAngel76 and other admin-level staff are capable of performing this action.



Third, I want to thank the programmers that have helped out with the Elkarte project and helping to get important features taken care of.

In particular, I want to thank Reno of Elliquiy for his work in getting mail bounce handling into Elkarte. This will ease the burden on our staff greatly and it is massively appreciated.

Of course, Elkarte can always use more coding assistance. : )

Getting this upgrade done is going to be rather more disruptive for Blue Moon than it is for E, unfortunately. It needs to happen, however - MyBB's database design is completely inappropriate for the PM-heavy load you folks put it through. Moving Elkarte will help ease the load PMs put on the system, at the very least.

There is a lot more to discuss about moving to Elkarte, but we will discuss more on that when things are ready for testing.



For CSS people

One serious issue that remains is not technically difficult so much as tedious. To better enable members to come up with new themes (or even allow members to do so without actually touching a line of css), we need to clean up Elkarte's css.

The primary issue right now is to simply move the color data into the color file, and move the non-color data out of it. The above-linked pull request demonstrates the sorts of changes that need to be made. I had hoped it would not take me so long but the code is rather depressing to go over.

This needs to be finished before we can continue, unfortunately. If you are familiar with CSS and comfortable with Github and/or are willing to learn, please consider contributing.

Obviously, it's a mess all around and much more can be done, but this is the only thing remaining that is a serious blocker to getting testing fully underway (and to ensure that we have nice-looking themes out of the gate).

Any help that you can provide would be appreciated.

If not, it's not a big deal - I've gone through about 30% of it in the past few days.




Thank you for reading, everyone. : )
 
Hey Vekseid,

I'm more than willing to help out with the CSS portion of it, if you could just explain what we're needing to have done to simplify it. I'm not familiar at all with Github but I'm willing to learn. I'm proficient enough in CSS and HTML to create and destroy things rather decently and I'm fairly good at forum design (though I admit I specialize in invisionfree and jcink style).

If you're still looking for help, you're always welcome to drop me a line. :)
 
HeyThereLittleBear said:
Hey Vekseid,

I'm more than willing to help out with the CSS portion of it, if you could just explain what we're needing to have done to simplify it. I'm not familiar at all with Github but I'm willing to learn. I'm proficient enough in CSS and HTML to create and destroy things rather decently and I'm fairly good at forum design (though I admit I specialize in invisionfree and jcink style).

If you're still looking for help, you're always welcome to drop me a line. :)
Same here. I have no clue what I'm doing with GITHub, or what exactly he wants us to 'clean up' I looked at it and the only thing I would clean up is formatting and remove the symbols. But for some reason I think those symbols are part of it, which is weird and not something I'm used to at all.
 
There are a lot of things that need to be done. I submitted another PR that covers about 30% of it:

https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/pull/2347/files

Basically the idea is to get colorization data (including backgrounds and other images) into _light, while the root files should have none of this.

There are a lot of other things too, like cleaning up !important rules, pruning unused css, merging duplicate entries, replacing images with Font Awesome icons, and so on. Most of that can wait, however.

The issue is asking people like you to make colorized themes is a lot more difficult if layout data is mixed in with it. Likewise, if all of the color data is isolated, it makes it easier to convert to say, a lightweight LESS/Stylus setup where members can build their own color themes without touching a single line of code. V. flexible.
 
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