Info XenForo v2 upgrade

[flowersofnight]

So. I've been forced to upgrade the forum to XenForo 2.x here because our old 1.x version won't work on new versions of PHP. This means we lost most of our customizations here, most importantly including the colors. I am aware that the background is currently puke-green, I am aware XD
Working on putting things more-or-less back as they were, but bear with it meanwhile. If anything is not working (as opposed to just being hideously ugly) let me know.

 

[Js_klaus]

Oh my lord, well it looks better on my phone now

 

[flowersofnight]

New features in XF2	that are good
Tables	That's all

 

[flowersofnight]

Anyway, having banished the puke green (EDIT: mostly banished) I'll fix the rest (such as those hideous blue gradients) later.

 

[heutre]

I like it! Thanks for your work

 

[flowersofnight]

I like it!

WELL I DON'T

But we should be able to get things more or less back how they were, it's just a matter of redoing all the XF 1.x customizations in the new 2.x style. I had to do a bunch of custom templating to get things like the icons and buttons looking right.

Incidentally, the reason for the forced upgrade is that XenForo 1.x isn't compatible with PHP versions newer than 7.1, and that version is out of support now. Dreamhost won't let you keep that old PHP version running much longer, and even then they want more money if you do.

 

[flowersofnight]

As long as I'm in here, I gave the favorites icon a resolution boost.



Left: new, right: old. But did the old one have more charm?

 

[sanctum]

The positions of the username and post date have been swapped on the thread view. Thanks to my muscle memory I keep clicking onto people's profiles instead of being sent to the latest post.

 

[flowersofnight]

Well, that one's easy enough actually. There we go.

But there are still more fiddly things to deal with such as getting the spacing right between things like the crosses and the avatars.
None of the text and colors are quite right anywhere but it'll do for starters.

For starters I want to get the forum icons back to normal on the main screen The custom buttons are missing everywhere too, though I wonder how many of them even "fit in" in XF2 by now.

 

[sanctum]

Not really a fan of the avatars displaying next to threads/forums either, but that is just a matter of personal taste.

 

[flowersofnight]

Not really a fan of the avatars displaying next to threads/forums either, but that is just a matter of personal taste.

Yeah, that is dumb. Fixed it.

For whatever reason, there are a lot of weird design decisions like that coded into Xenforo that you have to manually edit the templates to fix.

Next on the list is getting rid of the bright gray background on inactive forms and popup windows. And fixing those table headers so we can actually use tables.

Also, can I get some votes on the width? By default the forum width maxes out at 1200 pixels. In XF1 I overrode this to be "old-school" and 100% fill the width of the screen. Should I do that again or leave it "clamped"?

 

[sanctum]

I prefer the clamped look. One of the things I never have enjoyed about reading on a widescreen is having to drag my eyeballs all the way across the page to read.

 

[flowersofnight]

New tweaks:
Fixed the block quotes (so their width is 90% of the post width, not 100%)
Fooled with the lines above and below posts a bit, removed some but kept the line in between posts and signatures
Made the minimum post height 100 pixels + padding again
Adjusted quote borders a bit

The new page selectors serendipitously seem to go well with our theme so I'm leaving them as they are even though they're not quite the same as they used to be.

We seem to be stumbling into a more minimalist variation of the classic theme, for better or worse.

Also	tables	work	now
so	you can	arrange	data

EDIT: also moved the "green dot" online indicator above the avatar's top-right corner so as not to deface people's art choices. Another bizarre design decision by Xenforo that has to be manually overridden.

 

[flowersofnight]

Know why this new theme was so hard to read? No alternating background colors in posts. I re-added that (and the little gray dividing lines between posts), de-contrasted the quote boxes and put them back into the old style, and re-bolded usernames in the left panel. Also added a bit more padding to the post cells and moved the "signature line" down.

 

[sanctum]

It might just be me, but my muscle memory is making me feel like the 'Mark Forums Read' button is where the old view new posts button used to be.

 

[flowersofnight]

Yeah, in the old one it was just "Search" and then "Recent". I'll see if I can shuffle those around if I ever find where they're hiding the setting. (EDIT: done)

 

[flowersofnight]

I ALSO ADDED THE BLINK TAG

 

[sanctum]

Any chance you could add ActiveX controls and iFrames back in?

 

[flowersofnight]

I could actually put iframes back in, but I'm not going to, just because of all the poorly understood security holes it would lead to XD Anything involving cross-site permissions is a nightmare even on regular internet sites, let alone forums. Xenforo itself has had a number of hacks based on cross-site trickery if I understand correctly.

Here's another one: how about some RUBY/RT? (and RP for pedants)

RUBYルビー

Is that a little too "weeb"? Maybe.

 

[sanctum]

The Scape forums and threads are showing up again in Google search, I thought that was disabled.