The new, WordPress inspired site theme I have been working on the last few days is now live. This marks the end of the 32Bit and Classic theme.
P.S.: Yes, I know the site is broken in Internet Explorer. I tried to fix it up but failed due to some missing implementations. Please drop this piece of crap and finally change to Firefox. :tongue:
I am still working on the site and theme, just wanted to open it for everybody already. Adding more levels of depth to the menu won’t be a problem, I will probably do this if it does not bloat the code size too much.
Im very happy with how the site looks now (don’t get me wroung the old way was good but this is way better)and I really like how theres all of those pictures of concept art in the background it makes every page more exciteing :-).
Hmm… it looks pretty good, but functionally it kinda sucks. The giant VB at the top takes up WAY too much space, which is annoying when I check the forum. I used to be able to see everything on the forum by just going to the page… now I get a giant VB for half the screen, and half the forum for the rest. Then I’ve gotta scroll down to see the rest of the forum.
The other thing is the sides… there’s lots of wasted space on the sides, I assume because you’re designing it for people with low resolutions. Can’t you make it so it’s automatically wider for people w/ higher resolutions? Once again… less scrolling, because less word wraps on long posts.
Actually, the theme was designed for higher resolutions. I didn’t want text to strech all over the screen because I found it hard to read and not so good looking. A fixed width solves that and also ensures that the site looks the same on different resolutions.
If you guys don’t like it, I will consider offering an alternate theme again. A full width minimalist one with a small heading, small side menu, etc.
I assume what doesnt work in Internet Explorer is the dropdown menu part? I don’t have anything else but IE right now. I actually really like IE8, and never saw the point to get any other browser. Basically, Microsoft stole most of the good features of other browsers and used it on their own browser, so IE8 is actually pretty good in my oppinion.
Anyway, if you made a Features, Community, and Extra page (like you have for News/Games/Hardware), then the dropdown menu would not even be needed. So if you don’t fix the dropdown for IE, at least add those pages.
I guess the best part about the new look is it looks like a modern website, which shows that the community is still alive. But I do miss the 32 bit look!
I appreciate you doing all the work on this page and in this community KR155E. So first of all my thanks and respect for that. I love PVB!!!
However… I used to love to come to this page to get my fair portion of red and black headache. Why did the old themes have to die with this new one? Is it not compatible? Call me conservative but I always have a hard time getting used to new things.
It’s not only the menu, it’s a lot more. IE does not support stuff like “display: table;” which I used to get two equally high columns, it implements the box model incorrectly which causes it to mess up anything that has a padding and such stuff. IE is a pure nightmare to every webdeveloper or webdesigner. But: I got another menu partially working in IE btw, so I think I will replace the current one eventually. For now, I will create the overview pages you mentioned, good idea!
BTW, did you ever try out Firefox? I bet you’d never want back to IE again. It’s just so much quicker, more accurate, feels better, everything…
BenRPG:
It was just too old, made many years ago See, it’s not only the visual enhancements, It’s a lot you can’t see on first sight. I am using correct, standard complient markup, consequently use css to style, use divs instead of tables, doing search engine optimization and so on. Under the hood, the old themes were a mess. The Classic theme also involved some hacks here and there, for example to get different graphic sets in the forum, which I wanted to get rid of. I also thought that noone would miss it that much, personally I never used it anymore since the 32Bit theme launched. 😉
Opera was cool, but several websites I wanted to go to did not display very good.
Firefox just seems clunky to me. I of course use it whenever on a linux box, but that is about it. Plus, any page that wants traffic will be made to work with IE, so may as well conform in my oppinion.
As far as cosmetics, I think IE8 looks better than Firefox. The top bar takes up less space, it loosk more modern, and I just like the layout better.
I decided to install Firefox on my main machine to see the differences, and yeah, I can see how the site works better in Firefox. But I still prefer to use IE for now.
It works now. The only remaining problem is that it disappears when you zoom in, but I don’t think this is going to decrease usability.
EDIT: Oh right, that’s what the Z index is supposed to do.
What about auto login… it never seems to stay logged in for me. I assume it’s auto-login when the button says auto login, but I’ve also tried clicking it, and it still never keeps me logged in. I’m using Firefox 3.5.
Hmm, weird. The same problem was reported by RunnerPack. I also use Firefox 3.5 and I have no problems with autologin.
I wrote a JavaScript based substitute for a checkbox for the autologin button. It’s a hidden form element and a div which changes its background and the value of the hidden form element when clicked. It is checked by default.
I did not mess around with the auto login function itself, though, so I am not sure why it is not working for some. 😕
Any chance of getting the old envelopes back on the forum? It’s pretty hard to tell the difference between the blue ones (at least on my laptop). I remember you using them before, and me complaining about them before 😉 .
