about who's online, the search, the show your replies and dealing w the template

[luiscamino]

i finally upgraded one of my yabbse forums to smf without major problems. however since i checked "convert old template" during the installation, i'm afraid i'm losing some features that appear when using the default template.

by the way, i've tried searching it all but haven't really come up with anything enlightning, sorry 

1. well first of all, i really want to remove the "x Members and x Guests are viewing this board" thing on top of every board's message index, on the right of the linktree. how on earth can i do this? i've looked for the option in the admin center; i've been also surfing some template.php's, but nothing.

2. first thing not showing in my forum (and which i cannot find in the admin center or in the php's, neither): the cool "show unread posts since last visit" (i'd swear i saw it somewhere in my yabbse!) and "show new replies to your posts". i would love to know how to put these links anywhere in the template, where i want.

3. i would also like to put in the main template a simple search field. i asked for this feature long time ago for yabbse but it doesn't seem to have had a success... really, my users hardly notice the small "search" button on top of the page, and i think that a clear search field on every page would make it clearer for them to understand the importance of the search.

4. in general it would be great to know all those little features that aren't available in the admin center but can be put in the template somehow (how?). at least just i managed to put the "total time logged in" thing myself

5. last thing: i also asked this long time ago in the yabbse community, got response, and applied succesfuly to my yabbse forum. but it's gone with the template conversion: i had the names of the guests shown in the message index, the board index, the posts (and in general every place where membernames and guestnames appear) in a smaller and lighter font than the members'. for starters, since member names aren't links, they will appear as black text; usually darker and much more noticeable than member names (which are links). i think it's important to give guests the feeling they are sort of "inferior" in every aspect, and this is an important one. making their names appear lighter and smaller also gives members the fair feeling that they are sort of "superior". it's just a matter of categories. some one of the current smf supporters was the one who sorted this out for me back in yabbse times so i guess it won't be difficult to take a look at this again

thanks a lot for your help!

[[Unknown]]

1. well first of all, i really want to remove the "x Members and x Guests are viewing this board" thing on top of every board's message index, on the right of the linktree. how on earth can i do this? i've looked for the option in the admin center; i've been also surfing some template.php's, but nothing.

Actually, this is off by default ^_^.  Go to Admin -> Current Theme's Settings - it's in there .

2. first thing not showing in my forum (and which i cannot find in the admin center or in the php's, neither): the cool "show unread posts since last visit" (i'd swear i saw it somewhere in my yabbse!)

You didn't - at least not by default.

and "show new replies to your posts". i would love to know how to put these links anywhere in the template, where i want.

The links are simply:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=unread
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=unreadreplies

You can add whatever interface you want for them; a button, textual link... a dancing llama if you want.  Where do you want them?  I suggest you start by looking in Themes/converted/index.template.php.

3. i would also like to put in the main template a simple search field. i asked for this feature long time ago for yabbse but it doesn't seem to have had a success... really, my users hardly notice the small "search" button on top of the page, and i think that a clear search field on every page would make it clearer for them to understand the importance of the search.

Well, the default template has this.  There are a few ways to add this to your own, such as SSI and just outputting the form.  You might look in the default index.template.php for how it does it - look for ?action=search2.

4. in general it would be great to know all those little features that aren't available in the admin center but can be put in the template somehow (how?). at least just i managed to put the "total time logged in" thing myself

Some are under current theme's settings... others, well, are available in the default templates but not under the converted one simply because there's no way to guess what your customized template might've been like.  Stick a link in?  Where?  There?  How do I know where there is?

5. last thing: i also asked this long time ago in the yabbse community, got response, and applied succesfuly to my yabbse forum. but it's gone with the template conversion: i had the names of the guests shown in the message index, the board index, the posts (and in general every place where membernames and guestnames appear) in a smaller and lighter font than the members'. for starters, since member names aren't links, they will appear as black text; usually darker and much more noticeable than member names (which are links). i think it's important to give guests the feeling they are sort of "inferior" in every aspect, and this is an important one. making their names appear lighter and smaller also gives members the fair feeling that they are sort of "superior". it's just a matter of categories. some one of the current smf supporters was the one who sorted this out for me back in yabbse times so i guess it won't be difficult to take a look at this again

This may take modifying more templates than not; but you can usually tell in the templates whether they are a guest by checking if 'href' is nothing or not.

-[Unknown]

[luiscamino]

Some are under current theme's settings... others, well, are available in the default templates but not under the converted one simply because there's no way to guess what your customized template might've been like. Stick a link in? Where? There? How do I know where there is?
-[Unknown]

i see... then is there any place where i can see some more (all?) of this template-only features?

thanks for all the replies (how do you do it? ), i have another one one thing made me change several hyperlinks from my template, and it is the fact that whenever i browse my forum, it keeps adding a /htmlfile.html suffix to the url, making the browser think it's all runing in a subdirectory. this doesn't bother me a lot since it wasn't so hard to fix the broken links and it looks like it can even improve the indexing in search engines, but... why doesn't this (simplemachines.org/community) forum behave in the same way? is it another option i've activated accidentally? check it out, enter any board/topic and see the url: http://www.clubsonyericsson.com/forum/index.php

[[Unknown]]

Well... hmm, not really.  There aren't *all* that many.

Actually, yes, that's a feature.  It's called "queryless urls" or "show links without a ?" I think.

Broken links?  Even with that feature on, older links should still work.  Which links are broken?

-[Unknown]

[luiscamino]

any link set in the "../file.xxx" form will be broken if you use the queryless urls, since a new directory level is created in the url.

this way if you have this image "www.site.com/image.gif" called "<img src=../image.gif>"  in the template because the forum is in "www.site.com/board", it will show properly when browsing "www.site.com/board/index.php", but not when browsing "www.site.com/board/index.php/topic.html" because the browser will try to find "www.site.com/board/image.gif".

calling the image with "<img src=http://www.site.com/image.gif>" solves the problem.

anyway, does this querlyless url system offer better performance in search engines and search indexers? if not, which is its advantage?

[[Unknown]]

Why not use <base href="http://.../" /> then?

Or use full paths (not relative ones)?

Yes, some search engines, notably Google, will follow its links more than the standard - although the standard ones are pretty good too.

-[Unknown]