uiLight Tweetie - A twitter-like theme

[Develope]

[I am sorry, external links aren´t working for now]

Hello,
uiLight Tweetie is a twitter-like theme modification for SMF.
The focus of the theme lies on its simplicity.
The Theme is not finished at all, there is a lot to do!

Features at this point:

Boardfeed:
The Latest Topics are listed in the Boardfeed, sorted by date and new activities.

Notification System:
If someone replies to your topics or in a topic you replied, you will be notified.

Tooltips:
Tooltips to show more details on Topics, Boards and other Stuff.

Posted Media:
The latest Pictures (and maybe other media in the future) you posted will be displayed at this location.
I think this is kind of handy.

Trends:
The latest Pictures (and maybe other media in the future) you posted will be displayed at this location.
I think this is kind of handy.

Boards & Categories:
The actual Boards and Categories are moved to a dropdown menu.

Link Recognition and Textformat:
Boardfeed items have link recognition. For example youtube videos, or pictures.
Formated text can also be shown.

What do you think?
Do you have any suggestions or improvements ?

[ARG01]

Looking good so far. 

[aksal]

I want this. I gave up with SMF, but with this maybe there is a chance that I'll reconsider using SMF again. Please finish this theme.

[Rain Forest]

Nice

[Develope]

I´m glad you guys like the theme.

Here is a small update.

[Bloc]

I like it, its well done. Personally I feel its too much alike the real Twitter, but you definitely have theme skills.

[Xarkurai]

I like it, has good potential in my opinion.

[aksal]

Don't mimic Twitter in every way, just the Feed is the more important and innovative for a forum in 2014. One sidebar is more than enough. The boards should be shown in this sidebar. And don't forget to make it responsive. More and more users are using mobile devices nowdays (more than the desktop). With these in mind you can create something really trendy and cool.

[Develope]

Don't mimic Twitter in every way, just the Feed is the more important and innovative for a forum in 2014. One sidebar is more than enough. The boards should be shown in this sidebar. And don't forget to make it responsive. More and more users are using mobile devices nowdays (more than the desktop). With these in mind you can create something really trandy and cool.

I know exactly what smf is lacking in nowadays and I will try to cover some of it.
Also I am more interrested in innovative stuff and features than the actual design.
Nontheless this will be a Twitter-like theme.
Maybe I will try to create a new theme with all features at the end.

Oh and if you guys should have any ideas for new smf features
or cool new innovative things, post it here!

Maybe I will add some ideas.

[aksal]

Look at this https://meta.discourse.org/
This is the most modern forum concept we can find these days. And we really need something in this direction. The forums like they are today are soooooo old and out of the time and very static. The forums like SMF are the "HTML sites" of our days.

[Bloc]

Look at this https://meta.discourse.org/
This is the most modern forum concept we can find these days. And we really need something in this direction. The forums like they are today are soooooo old and out of the time and very static. The forums like SMF are the "HTML sites" of our days.

Apart from being darn right ugly, I prefer a SMF Twitter-like theme any day. At least Twitter has understood the concept of user friendliness AND good design.

Don't mimic Twitter in every way, just the Feed is the more important and innovative for a forum in 2014. One sidebar is more than enough. The boards should be shown in this sidebar. And don't forget to make it responsive. More and more users are using mobile devices nowdays (more than the desktop). With these in mind you can create something really trandy and cool.

I know exactly what smf is lacking in nowadays and I will try to cover some of it.
Also I am more interrested in innovative stuff and features than the actual design.
Nontheless this will be a Twitter-like theme.
Maybe I will try to create a new theme with all features at the end.

Oh and if you guys should have any ideas for new smf features
or cool new innovative things, post it here!

Maybe I will add some ideas.

I think you are on the right track already..what SMF lacks is really designers/themers that dare to change the templates more than just color changes. One of the first SMF themes I made as the user "Bloc" was a lookalike for Joomla's default theme at the time. When I put it up at my site, many thought I had converted to joomla lol.

You learn a lot by trying to look like other sites, and there are always people that will appreciate it. Plus, you can then add personal touches, like change the colorset or what you already are doing: transforming Twitter-special sections/functions into SMF specific sections. Just that is an achievement in itself, just finding the ideas for that.

So don't feel discouraged by comments ..some of these people don't understand at all how much work that goes with a theme like this, where theres no precedence, no earlier SMF themes to borrow from. Do it like YOU want it and it will be great.

[JBlaze]

Look at this https://meta.discourse.org/
This is the most modern forum concept we can find these days. And we really need something in this direction. The forums like they are today are soooooo old and out of the time and very static. The forums like SMF are the "HTML sites" of our days.

Oh, honey... no. Discourse is awful. Just plain, downright awful.

[Arantor]

You should see how the folks at TDWTF are finding it and how many bugs they keep reporting to the Discourse team that get written off as by design.

[aksal]

Well, when I see your reactions here I remember the reactions of Altavista or Lycos when Google came out. Or the reactions of MySpace, Hi5 and others when Facebook came out. The reactions of Apple fanboys when Android came out and so on.... You are backward guys, so backwards.......!
I may have only a few posts here, but I use SMF since it was alpha. Those days when [Unknown] was around. When SMF had those cool features that not even vBulletin, IPB and others didn't had. But that was about it. Now it is 2014 and SMF has the same features! New versions take forever to came out, the changes are minimal and not enough at all. And the themes? They are a joke. Nothing but some css changes. No innovation at all.
When I mention Discourse.org is not about how it looks, that I don't like either, but how it works, how innovative it is. That is about it. I still don't understand why in the world should the forums be so static. Like a directory of topics. Why that column with the numbers of topics and posts? It takes so much valuable real estate for so irrelevant informations. And the really relevant information is presented in a terrible way, or not presented at all. And, in this time of mobile devices is all about usability. The forums like they are today are not usable. Even if they are responsive. Just the usability is a pain in ass. And I think Discourse.org had fixed it. And there are so many other features relevant to a modern forum.

Why I don't change this myself? Because I'm not a coder. But I have forums with millions of posts and users. I'm in this Industry since 10 years now. I think I know what is relevant to the users these days. But I'm done with you guys. I don't see any hope for you.

Cheers.

[Arantor]

Trust me, you spend time on a Discourse forum, make thousands of posts on one and you begin to realise just how unusable it is. Try it on mobile sometime. Jeff himself has said he doesn't care about Android because it 'works well enough on Apple' or words to that effect.

Hint: go to what.thedailywtf.com, look for Arantor, that's me. Look also for the amount of complaints and criticisms and bugs we keep finding and the devs keep telling us are by design, even when the design is utterly stupid. So many bugs come out of the stupid design decisions Discourse makes. Also, you know you have to have a VPS to run Discourse, right? It won't run on shared hosting like, you know, most people use.

[aksal]

As I said, I don't like a lot of thing there too. For me it is slow, the endless scrolling is stupid, as are those avatars on the frontpage and many other things,  but the direction is right, as many other features. Forums should change. Should be about the topics and the posts, and not about irrelevant informations.
When you enter a forum don't see the topics firstly,  but prominently boards names, categories names, descriptions of the boards, number of topics and themes, other irrelevant stats and so on.
If you want to post something, you have to enter the forum, enter board, maybe another subboard, click a button and here you can post. To long, to complicated for the regular user. Maybe you are not registered? You have to take a long way to register. Is it that difficult to add the possibility to register with Facebook or Twitter?

If some trends are relevant to be used from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo and other big players, why in the world they should't be relevant for forums? Or, they are applied from vB, IPB, phpBB and so on, but no, not from SMF.
But guys, most of you are just coders, you don't understand what is important today, in a world where the trends change every 6 months. You have just to be paid for projects that you give life, but are not able to concept. Don't tell me, this is free, you are not paid and bla bla bla. Wordpress is open source and free too, but it is always on the top.

[Arantor]

Because having separated categories of things is a good thing. In fact, Discourse has a list of boards and categories just like the old forums do. The only difference is that Discourse throws you a list of recent topics as the front page, which is fine if you keep up with forums. Most people, though, don't do that. They find an area or areas to post in that suit the discussion at hand, something Discourse is surprisingly good at discouraging.

Facebook, Twitter etc are all fantastic if you only care about the current stuff. Forums as a general rule are not just for 'new' and 'latest' but archived discussions which are a complete PITA to do in Discourse - even a discussion a month old might as well not have happened there.

WordPress may be on top but it has so many more contributors, and to be honest the codebase hasn't changed significantly in several years because it's actually not able to without breaking compatibility.

[aksal]

This is not SMF vs. Discourse discussion. Who said the categories or boards are something bad. Not at all. This is great about forums, they are searchable and one topic  could be activated in any moment, every time. Something that Social networks can't do. But, forums are active communities and we have new technologies that could make the platform more and more usable. Because SMF was good in 2005 this doesn't mean we should stay there.
We are off topic here. A new discussion about the issue is in this topic http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=526192.0

[NanoSector]

Stop this discussion and get back on topic, keep your mud throwing at us in your original topic.

On-topic: Nice theme, are you going to make the modifications universal for other themes?

[Develope]

Look at this https://meta.discourse.org/ [nofollow]
This is the most modern forum concept we can find these days. And we really need something in this direction. The forums like they are today are soooooo old and out of the time and very static. The forums like SMF are the "HTML sites" of our days.

Apart from being darn right ugly, I prefer a SMF Twitter-like theme any day. At least Twitter has understood the concept of user friendliness AND good design.

Don't mimic Twitter in every way, just the Feed is the more important and innovative for a forum in 2014. One sidebar is more than enough. The boards should be shown in this sidebar. And don't forget to make it responsive. More and more users are using mobile devices nowdays (more than the desktop). With these in mind you can create something really trandy and cool.

I know exactly what smf is lacking in nowadays and I will try to cover some of it.
Also I am more interrested in innovative stuff and features than the actual design.
Nontheless this will be a Twitter-like theme.
Maybe I will try to create a new theme with all features at the end.

Oh and if you guys should have any ideas for new smf features
or cool new innovative things, post it here!

Maybe I will add some ideas.

I think you are on the right track already..what SMF lacks is really designers/themers that dare to change the templates more than just color changes. One of the first SMF themes I made as the user "Bloc" was a lookalike for Joomla's default theme at the time. When I put it up at my site, many thought I had converted to joomla lol.

You learn a lot by trying to look like other sites, and there are always people that will appreciate it. Plus, you can then add personal touches, like change the colorset or what you already are doing: transforming Twitter-special sections/functions into SMF specific sections. Just that is an achievement in itself, just finding the ideas for that.

So don't feel discouraged by comments ..some of these people don't understand at all how much work that goes with a theme like this, where theres no precedence, no earlier SMF themes to borrow from. Do it like YOU want it and it will be great.

Thanks!
You are right, that is exactly what i intend to do. My plan is to create a twitter-like theme, where I am going to add my personal touches at the end.
And I don´t feel discouraged at all! It is a lot of work but I like creating things, so it is actually fun working on it.

Stop this discussion and get back on topic, keep your mud throwing at us in your original topic.

On-topic: Nice theme, are you going to make the modifications universal for other themes?

Thank you, do you mean something like a modification package, that applies all the features to every other theme?
If so, I don´t know if this would work at this point. It´s a lot of template rewriting.