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Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
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Arantor

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Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« on July 23rd, 2012, 05:43 PM »
This is something that's annoyed me a bit about SMF in the past, curious to know what people think.

At the foot of the board index, you get icons indicating whether a board has new posts, no new posts or is a redirect board.

Even if you don't have any redirect boards, it still shows up. I figure it should hide that if there's no redirect boards. It's a trivial enough matter to do since we'll know by that point if we've had any redirect boards.

Thoughts?
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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #2, on July 23rd, 2012, 07:12 PM »
Does anyone even look at that legend?

If it was up to me I would vote to remove the legend completely and remove the icons for some nice new icons or new done in CSS, whatever.

In any matter I always end up tearing that portion of the template out anyways. In fact I don't see those icons on the bottom of the board index here. :D
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Arantor

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #4, on July 23rd, 2012, 08:12 PM »
I see them now, didn't realize that link there.

In any matter the layout there is not too pretty. I say just remove them, people don't use the legends anyway. If you really need to you can probably put them in a help section. Another part of SMF I try to hide.

Arantor

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markham

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #6, on July 24th, 2012, 10:30 AM »
Having a legend at the foot of the Board Index is useful but I do agree that there's little point in showing the legend for redirected boards when there are none. As for the whole thing getting some "UI love", that depends on what you have in mind; right now, it's fine as far as I personally am concerned but these things are very subjective.

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Nao

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #8, on July 24th, 2012, 06:55 PM »
My suggestions...

- Remove the small icons altogether.
- Keep only ONE copy of the (large) board icon, the unread state. (The boardstatus.png file goes from 1.5KB to 624 bytes.)
- If board is read, apply an opacity of 0.5 to that icon, to make it look like it's a dimmed down version of the icon.
- Makes it easy to replace a board icon with a media item thumbnail.
- Don't show a legend (at all). Instead, show a clear 'NEW' or 'REDIRECT' note (using the note class or a child) next to the board name.

Arantor

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #9, on July 24th, 2012, 07:09 PM »
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- Remove the small icons altogether.
No problem with that.
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- If board is read, apply an opacity of 0.5 to that icon, to make it look like it's a dimmed down version of the icon.
- Makes it easy to replace a board icon with a media item thumbnail.
My issue with that is with themes that want to use a different icon entirely, I'd personally quite like that option.
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- Don't show a legend (at all). Instead, show a clear 'NEW' or 'REDIRECT' note (using the note class or a child) next to the board name.
Works for me, and is the sort of thing I was asking about ;)

Nao

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #10, on July 24th, 2012, 08:15 PM »
So, here's what I came up with... It's online here.
- There are no redirect boards, but just so you know, it has an opacity set to .25, which works fine for me. I don't know how best to indicate it's a redirect board, but now at least the icon will have a title saying it is such a board.
- I think there's a nicer balance between on/off states with this icon.

Overall, it's committable material. I'd just like to point out that nothing prevents us from allowing users to set up a 'read' icon state for boards -- and if not there, rely on the default fallback, i.e. opacity: .5 :)

Arantor

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #11, on July 24th, 2012, 08:20 PM »
Well, redirect boards normally have a different icon for that reason ;)

Perhaps in hindsight we should alter redirect boards to actually indicate they are redirect boards through the board type column ;)

I haven't got any read/unread boards to do a comparison on here.

If it's commitable, commit it because if we decide we don't like it we can always change it later, the joys of version control :)

And yes that does solve my larger concern - as long as themers can easily change it, great :)

Nao

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #12, on July 24th, 2012, 08:35 PM »
Quote from Arantor on July 24th, 2012, 08:20 PM
Well, redirect boards normally have a different icon for that reason ;)

Perhaps in hindsight we should alter redirect boards to actually indicate they are redirect boards through the board type column ;)
Ah, yes, a very good suggestion, semantically...
Heck, thinking about it, we could provide different default boardstate icons per board type... (Although it would then mean extra space in the CSS file... Hmm. Well, we could always have them as actual image files, just like it used to be in SMF and all... But then it means Google PageSpeed will complain about the extra icons not being put into a sprite.)
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I haven't got any read/unread boards to do a comparison on here.
Ah, well, I suppose my new posts will help...?
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If it's commitable, commit it because if we decide we don't like it we can always change it later, the joys of version control :)
Yeah. At least something Git can't take away from SVN, ahah!

Arantor

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #13, on July 26th, 2012, 05:18 AM »
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Ah, yes, a very good suggestion, semantically...
Heck, thinking about it, we could provide different default boardstate icons per board type...
Actually, I was debating going one step further. I agree that default board state icons per board type would be good, but what if we provided the option for different templates for displaying in the board index? Right now all the board types are exactly the same except for redirection boards. If we could provide facilities for templating each specific board type, some of the stuff I've wanted to do gets much simpler, and we get all sorts of neat customisation very easily (even for mods!)

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Re: Only display 'Redirect boards' when there actually are any
« Reply #14, on July 26th, 2012, 05:32 AM »
Quote from Arantor on July 26th, 2012, 05:18 AM
Quote
Ah, yes, a very good suggestion, semantically...
Heck, thinking about it, we could provide different default boardstate icons per board type...
Actually, I was debating going one step further. I agree that default board state icons per board type would be good, but what if we provided the option for different templates for displaying in the board index? Right now all the board types are exactly the same except for redirection boards. If we could provide facilities for templating each specific board type, some of the stuff I've wanted to do gets much simpler, and we get all sorts of neat customisation very easily (even for mods!)
That sounds good. Theme authors wouldn't be required to use them but they will be there if they decide they want that. Basically giving a little more extra power to the theme authors.

I think SMF was trying to head in this direction as you can choose different templates per board, but having different templates per area within a main template is more appealing then the mess of installing multiple templates just to use a message template from it.

Maybe even better is to split the template sections up into groups where each section of a template is selectable. Say you can release a template but it may contain a few files for the post display. Maybe these can be stored in a main template that only contains minor templates that modify little stuff and rely on a main templates CSS for styling or maybe the minor template can have its own CSS which it specifies the system to load with the main template.
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