DRD Team

Any subsilver2 based skin must be modified in order to show the subforums the way you want. I did it with the default skin because to me knowing there was a post in "Bugs" rather than just GZDoom was a feature of the phpBB2 board that I thought should not be lost in the transition to phpBB3.

The reason it is the way it is, is because in order for subsilver2 to show whether subforums had new posts you had to parse the style sheet. For some reason, they turned off the style sheet parsing, I think mostly to make it so it can be modifed directly on the file system itself. Anyway, instead of turning on style sheet parsing, I put in pre-parsed code instead, and added the icons myself, using what was already there.

When I get around to it, I'll modify a few of the other subsilver2-based designs to have the same functionality.

Different rotations and different frames would increase the possibilities would they not? Or is it still too limited?

Anyway, with any luck, I'll not be seeing them again. I've visited a few times since and always been auto-logged on. I've also changed my board skin away from the default so that it is obvious if I'm not logged in.

I really like the look of a few of the skins but some remove a little functionality. eg I liked one (I forget the name now) but it didn't put little new posts icons beside the names of the sum menus. So, I would, for example, know that there were new posts in the GZDoom forum, but wouldn't know that they were in the bugs sub forum until I went into the GZDoom forum first. With the default (and the one I'm using now) I could tell straight way that there was a post in bugs and jump straight to that thread.

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Skin opinions

The skin that I am using is Hermes. I quite like the relatively subtle contrasts in colours.

I almost really liked Black Pearl but the bright yellow text killed it for me. If that had been a more subtle colour, I would have probably used it.

Darkoholic and Mergenine Pure Black both miss out the little icons that I was talking about (I think Pure Black was the one that I was going to use until I noticed the missing icons)

Pro Dark is OK but I find the grey a bit stark looking.

Pro Silver and Sub Silver. I used to like both of these but on my new monitor they are too bright.

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KittenAuth works, but only because it's not default for the phpBB3 installation. In probably less than 10 minutes, I could probably come up with a program that would recognize the pictures and identify them easily - especially if they are Doom monsters because there is no variation between 2 monsters of the same type. Sure, you could recolor them, but recolored monsters are often given different names, and that could easily lead to confusion.

I salute this idea and wish for it to be carried to fruition!

[quote="SoulPriestess"]If needed, I'll eventually find a better solution.[/quote]
I can see it. KittenAuth, with the Doom engine monsters instead of baby animals. "Please click on all cacodemons."

Recently, the cookie settings were changed so that you would be logged in if you were viewing hostee home pages. The main reason for this was to streamline session control, because with the old settings you would be logged in as "Guest" and show up in the "Who is online" as Guest when you really were not.

So the cookie domain was set to drdteam.org, instead of forum.drdteam.org. This had another side effect, however: it broke the cookie system entirely with some browsers, and you couldn't even stay logged in. So, the cookie names had to be changed in order to compensate for this. This force-logged everyone out. I doubt that many people noticed, though, so I never made an announcement about it.

Anyway, the CAPTCHA settings that I use differ from the default because spam bots are coded to be able to read CAPTCHA at the default settings. So far, they've rarely defeated the current implementation, so I'm going to keep it for now. I know it's difficult to read, but hopefully you'll rarely ever have to use it.

If needed, I'll eventually find a better solution.

Not sure why, but when I arrived here today, I wasn't logged in. In fact, that may have been the case for a few days and I never noticed. I was wondering why there didn't seem to be any new posts. :P I normally have the "log me in automatically" option set.

Anyway, I entered my username and password and was denied access. I tried again with a different password in case I had misremembered, then tried again with a third password. None let me in. Then, I checked my notes and found that I had used the correct password the first time. So, I tried again, no deal. I kept trying a few more times, every now and again being prompted to enter a captcha because I had exceeded my login attempts number and suddenly, ofter I guess about 10-12 tries I got in using the password that I had been using all along (except for the attempts with a different one). :dunno:

BTW, I know that's the whole point, but I did find the captchas harder to read than most.

Awesome. I'm loving the new styles as well. :angel:

Great job SoulPriestess! Loving the diffrenet themes :)

:shock: came back to the forums this morning thinking "oh cool, new logo"

then I noticed.

Nice work, SP, I think you have have applied the proverbial Shock paddles to the forums, yay!

Thank you. ^^

whoohoo!!! \o/
Finally i don't have to look where i can find there settings in Users control panel xD
reason : i almost never worked with PHPBB 2.
anyways, well done SoulPriestess, Well done! :)

The style is pretty much HTML but it's really PHP. And I forgot to give you the .css page, but you can download it easily here: http://svn.drdteam.org/svn.css

Everything is in 4 files. news.php and page.php just execute c-include.php for every post they represent, and neither of them have anything to do with styling.

So is the style made of CSS or HTML? Or both? What is stored where?

It's not much different than your Joomla! system, that you use at Realm667, really. With some very notable exceptions, however:

phpBB is a forum system, not a CMS system. In fact, any page content you have tied to the forums has to be programmed by hand, or installed from a mod.

Also, blocks are not customizable. You have to make them yourself.

Overall, phpBB is far better as a forum system than Joomla!, however Joomla! is far better than phpBB at presenting content.

If you were to give this site a make-over, though, it could easily be done because of the way the CMS's were made. All you really need is some phpBB templates and some headers/footers/post templates for the CMS's, and you can completely redesign the entire site with that.

phpBB has two sample styles in its download, under the "styles" directory. If you're good with HTML, these styles are easier than you might think to change.

Attached is the c-include.php from the SVN site, which so far is the cleanest coded style file. It contains all the templates used on that site, and similar files are used for the hostees and the home page.
[attachment=0]c-include.php.gz[/attachment]

I have a newer version that uses XHTML, but it's not finished yet.

If you really really want it, I'll zip up the NewDRD style for you from the board.

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EDIT: Slightly offtopic...

The forums should be faster now.

For some reason, when I imported the database from my computer, it automatically chose InnoDB to store all its tables. If you don't know what that means, it means this: double the disk space, double the access time.

So I've went through and converted every table to MyISAM. This has also increased the site's survivability in its current state, because once the SQL database hits 100 MB, it will stop accepting new entries.

So now, instead of a 76mb database, and looking to move the site to a new host, we're now down to 41mb, and things should be MUCH faster. ^^