Beta 6 is still not in a stage ready to be released to the masses. I keep finding some unusual errors and I know that it's not friendly to Internet Explorer yet. So far I have created the basic structure for the site and it should be a downhill ride from here on out fixing errors that come up. I spent most of tonight and I have made some real improvements from when I last reported. The original layout was only 700 pixels wide, which I have updated to 800px now. This second release is NOT a usable copy, it is once again only a preview release for testing. Please don't use this on an operational site. If you have any spare time and experience with Smarty/CSS feel free to help out and submit any changes to me.
Why you should update when Beta 6 is released:
Some of you may be quite happy with your current layout and haven't yet made the update to the latest 5.x Smarty release. There are a few reasons why you should update when we release Beta 6 shortly down the road. First, all previous releases of Pligg seem to use bits of CSS code taken from digg.com. There is also an image (the tab image) that was either taken, or based on digg's. It would be a good idea to stop using these items ASAP. Second, the latest Smarty release will make it easier to update the code without changing the template down the road. The core of Pligg code will be stored seperately from your template files. I believe that Smarty will also reduce a small amount of server load and help improve load times. The third reason that you should update when Beta 6 is released is that the new standard template should be pretty simple to change to your liking pretty fast. It uses the usual "blog-like" layout with the articles/posts on the left and information kept on a right-side bar. The basic three images (header, body and footer) will make it really easy to customize the site by just replacing the images. I will do my best to release a few additional templates down the road demonstrating this idea.
The template should be finished by this weekend (a week later than expected). I want to triple-check everything on a few different web enviroments to make sure that this is compatable with most servers and browsers. Currently Firefox and Opera display the site well, but IE is displaying 2 items (the vote button and "pligg for stories" background) incorrectly. This is a step forward from not displaying the vote button at all from the last template release.
Errors and such:
- User profile page has a previous and next button at the bottom, which are useless.
- User profile page lacks tabs right now
- Need to work on the search bar (default "search" text)
- Index page: sidebar is lying a little low.
- Most pages have not been finished! Only the index, faq and login are close to being finished.
Updates:
- Index is almost finished
- FAQ is finished
- New Vote Image
- Now 800 pixels wide (was 700)
The download attached is a templated version of Pligg Beta 5.8. Once again, this is only for testing, it's still not finished.
You can see the Preview Release here:
http://www.scadart.com