My forum system

[Pezzoni]

I finally completed the front end to this over the weekend (admin pannel still needs work), and I'm now attempting to perform a degree of public testing on it (which has thrown up some things I'd never even noticed!)
Just as a note, it is best viewed in Firefox - I've yet to spend time getting it working compeltely as it should be in IE or Opera.

I would be interested to see what the people here thought of it - Thanks!

Edit: Forgot the link!
It lives here: [a href=\"http://www.generation-designs.co.uk/osf/index.php\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.generation-designs.co.uk/osf/index.php[/a]

Thanks for your time,

Dan

[Pezzoni]

As a side note, this is something which I seriously want to continue the development of.
However, this is something which I’m not going to be also to achieve on my own: If the project is to go anywhere significant, then it is going to have to be developed with a team of people.
As such, I’m looking for people with any of the following skills:

PHP and JavaScript Coders
If you are interested in developing the PHP side of things, then you need to be a competent coder, comfortable with OOP programming, MySQL (any additional database types would be a bonus), and be willing to adapt to a specific coding style, and contribute as part of a team.
People who are competent with JavaScript are also needed – especially those who can combine their knowledge with PHP in an AJAX related situations.

Designers
Someone with good HTML and CSS skills is required, who is able to create inventive, good looking, standards compliant, easy to use designs – It is very likely that we will be looking to move in a direction in which tables are likely to be unwanted for the majority of situations.

Graphics
People who are able to create images in a similar style to those already displayed to compliment a design. This role could also be combined with the above.

For all the roles, it is important that you are able to work in a team and get on with other people, as well as being able to work independently if this is necessary. You should have the time to be able to work on the project to a reasonable degree, although it will certainly be something which can be carried out in your ‘spare time’; if you can contribute maybe 5 hours a week (or more) of decent coding time, then that would probably be enough.
Some experience with Linux and more specifically CVS would be helpful, although is definitely not requisite.

If you’re interested, or want more details, then feel free to contact me via by Private Message on the forums.

Thanks!

Dan

[b][i]edit: removed email from post[/i][/b]

[moberemk]

Tables. TABLES. You designed your system using TABLES for layout. Now, for the forums posts, they're fine, but for everything else, why not use CSS?
Now then, on to the review: lighten the backgrounds a little-they don't have enough contrast with the black text. In your breadcrumbs, increase the padding and remove the underlines. I don't like the orange border around grey boxes in your post view-stick with the dark grey borders instead. And PLEASE bring those font sizes up a bit. They look tiny. And when you log in, your tables that hold the images to create the angles at the top mess up.
Now, one of the things that I don't like about fixed-width designs is the fact that they seem so small on my screen. As in, it takes up roughly a third of my screen, leaving you with a lot of blank, unused whitespace.
Overall, a good design, but not great.

Now, for funtionality: Going out on a limb here, but For your registration page, why did you put the labels on the right and your fields to the left? That goes against all common sense (Also, for accessibility, try making the labels <label> tags with the for attribute). While I was browsing around, I noticed that it said "Latest Post" and then showed the username and the time. Now the question is: what topic was it in? Sure, I could open up the forum and look, but where's the fun in that? I also ran your page through the w3c validation service. [a href=\"http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.generation-designs.co.uk%2Fosf%2Findex.php\" target=\"_blank\"]21 errors[/a] is a fairly large amount.

All in all, this is a fair design and an okay forum system so far. It still needs some work though.

[Pezzoni]

I agree that the templates need a fair bit of work (they don't look as they should outside of Firefox for example), and the majority of what you said was sensible - It is also a problem I hope to alleviate in the future by getting dedicated people to work on the design, it was somthing that felt a bit rushed throughout, with it being knocked together to fit around the functionality, rather than the other way round.

One thing that really does need addressing in the codebase is the use of & insted of &amp; in URL's - which is responsible for the vast majority of validation errors.

Thankyou - your comments have been taken upon board and will be acted upon in the future :)

[moberemk]

Sorry about the link-fixed it.
Out of curiosity, do you plan on including WYSIWYG or URL rewriting? Because those are two features I'd kill to see in a forum system. Maybe [a href=\"http://dojotoolkit.org/\" target=\"_blank\"]dojo[/a] could help you there.
And as for the logo, why does it have to be a PNG? Next to no one supports that.

[Pezzoni]

WYSIWYG - Maybe - it seems a little excessive for a forum system (the idea is to communicate content primerially, with the layout of that for individual posts seeming a little insignificant).

URL Rewriting - As in modifiying the URL for SEO purposes? It's a possibility, although from what I've read, if redundant data is stripped from URL's from search engines, it doesn't really offer much in the way of SEO benefits.

PNG - As far as I know, IE6 is the only vaugely modern browser that doesn't support it properly, and when I started, I was in a 'sod IE' phase. If the project continues to move on, I imagine that a backwards leap to GIF/JPEG is inevitable to ensure proper transparancy compatibility.

As for standards, it seems to be largely the use of actual & (and maybe = ?) signs which is causing problems - only one error is caused by somthing else! Definately somthing which needs sorting.

[moberemk]

Oddly enough, my use of that same thing doesn't make it not validate. Weird.

[Pezzoni]

Seems like it definately is the source of the problem:
[a href=\"http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp[/a]

[moberemk]

Well, good luck fixing it!