OK, I’m a little disappointed in myself for not putting much effort into my Hip Hop Forums site. I’m a DJ, so I have a genuine interests in music and I really want to see those forums grow into a decent sized online community, but it won’t happen magically so I better get going with it. But before I jump all in, I want to make a few changes. They’re small changes, but i think overall it will make the forums more appealing.
Things I needed to change are:
- Forums Appearance.
The Forums are kind of plain looking; I wanted to add some life to it. I figured I could do this by adding a section to the front page that would contain a recent music related article along with a nice sized picture of the artists. I wanted the article to appear at the top, with the forums starting immediately under it. Setting up articles in the tinyportal mod was slightly confusing, but eventually I got it set up. There were a few unexpected issues, such as when viewing the actual article in a browser window that was not expanded, the blocks from the right panel would float in front of the article. The workaround was to disable the right panel while in article view.
New look with Artist Image
Not a big deal I guess. One nice feature about using articles with Blocks (Tinyportal mod) is that I can create a bunch of articles (with artist images) and when I’m ready to give my forums a new look, I simply select a new article from the Block drop down list. Another issue was that once you view the article, the text was a light blue almost transparent looking. It was using the body tag in the css file. I changed it to black, but then of course since it’s the body tag, a few other areas were affected: the pop up windows now have black text over a black background. I’m still trying to find the actual file (not the css file) that references the article text so I can assign a new class.
- Incorrect Copyright Year.
A very small issue, The copyright year still says 2009. I don’t want to keep having to remember to update it each year, so I added some code to grab the current year automatically.
Insert the following:<? echo date(‘Y’); ?>
So the full code would read:
copyright 2009 – <? echo date(‘Y’); ?> HipHopForums.org
That would set the copyright to: 2009 – 2010
- Font is Too Large in the Recent Posts Section.
The Recent Posts section lists the last 10 posts. The font is so large that each line gets word-wrapped and just looks sloppy. I don’t enjoy searching through smf site files; it makes even the smallest changes take up too much time. I’ll give you an example, I just did a properties check on my Hip Hop Forums directory and the site has 10,480 files inside of 300 folders! Now of course all of those are not being used, and many are probably images, language files, etc, but you have to see what I mean! lol. Anyway, I found the file (BoardIndex.template.php) that I needed to make the changes to. I want to make the font size smaller, and stop the text from word-wrapping, so I deleted the first column (board name) and just adding a new class to each of the remaining two table columns. The new classes were obviously font size classes.
Well that was enough for me, I am ready to get this forum started!
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