Pligg Beta 6 Early Preview 2

[Yankidank]

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

[SpyMy]

Front page looks good to me in Firefox, but some of the other pages are pretty bad, don't know if you've got to those yet?

Register page for example is missing the background and is a total jumble and the login page the text fields overflow the box.

I actually know the guy that made this theme too, if you want me to talk to him perhaps he could give us a hand or something.

/story/1 doesn't use the template because it can't pick up the .css files

The links are "css/navigation.css" and you need "/css/navigation.css" for it to work as /anything/ is outside the root directory.

That should fix it anyway.

[Yankidank]

I always miss the obvious. Thanks for correcting me SpyMy. I still need to configure most of the pages to fit the design, but I ran out of time last night and I knew that I wouldn't have much time to work on it again for a couple of days. I thought it might speed up development if I released it to the public for some help. Cool to know that you know the original designer, you should definitely contact him and let him know we're using his template. The one area I could use some help with is cleaning up the CSS file, it's a jumble right now and has a lot of extra tags that aren't needed. Same goes for some of the PHP files that are laid out poorly and need to be formatted.

[SpyMy]

Once you've ported across to smart and all I can help with the template/css and tidying up the PHP/language sections.

IF we are going to have multiple editors/contributors we should set up a Subversion repository or something.

We can make sure the PHP files are well commented too, then perhaps use something like PHPDoc.

BTW for the issues with IE, you should use the IE Developer Toolbar:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

For firefox you can use the developer extension:

http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

I've spoken to Ivan too, he said the IE thing is a problem with the padding/alignment and there are too many unecessary divs.

Regarding the template, he says probably in March/April he could work with us to make a new Pligg template from the ground up, rather than hacking an old one (which was made for a blog style interface), he has experience with smarty too.

He's pretty busy at the moment, but he'll give some good input I think.

[Yankidank]

SpyMy: I've been using the Firefox webdeveloper extension, thanks for mentioning it. It's a useful tool for anyone who wants to test and analyze CSS in FF. I will have to try the IE toolbar though for the IE problems though.

I just noticed that the Macintosh version of Firefox doesn't display the vote area correctly. I'm on a Mac machine now and the image doesn't fit properly and the vote text displays incorrectly. Besides that problem, the finished pages look fine on the Mac FF.

I haven't yet started to clean up the CSS file because I'm stil not finished with setting up the template and I didn't want to remove any tags that might be handy later on. I could use the help with cleaning up all of the files once we publish a final version.

[KingPin]

I still cannot get my nav bar on the right hand side tho it still seems to be all the way on the bottom right hand side, any ideas?(clean install)

[Yankidank]

I'm having trouble figuring out what exactly your situation is. Did you install the latest test release of Pligg Beta 6 with the new template, and the navbar is appearing in an odd spot? Post a screenshot if you can.

[KingPin]

http://www.onekps.com/ is the sandbox environment.

[SpyMy]

This will be useful when we get to a decent state for keeping things tidy:

http://erraticwisdom.com/2006/01/18/...izing-your-css

[Yankidank]

Oh, you mean the sidebar KingPin. Navbar reffers to the line that says www.domain.com >> published or something like that to show you where you are. I've started a blog to talk about Pligg progress. This way we can keep some of the progress reports out of the forum and save some space. You can read it at www.pligg.com/blog/ .