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Started by Sir Osis of Liver, July 02, 2019, 12:05:24 AM

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Sir Osis of Liver

Quote from: Antechinus on September 15, 2015, 01:41:18 AM
It'd actually be easy to reinstate the sidebar menu option. I may code it for a custom theme and/or mod at some point.

Has anyone tried this?  Would be interested to know where to start.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Antechinus

Oh that. Yep, piece of cake if you really want to do it. How? I'd have to refresh my memory as it's been a while since I dug into SMF coding, but in short there are several basic approaches.

1/ Simply restyle the existing menu CSS so that it becomes a sidebar instead of a line of drop menus. Easiest to do, but obviously doesn't allow both as options.

2/ Combine 1/ with the theme variant system, with one variant having CSS for the drop menus and the other variant having CSS for the sidebar. This is not much more difficult, since you already have the CSS for the drops.

3/ If you really want to have the menu alternatives selectable as profile>look and layout options you can do that too, but it's much of a muchness in terms of functionality. You have to go to a profile page anyway, and it makes little difference which one it is.

The other thing is that it's easy to include a variant switcher (session-dependent or permanent) anywhere on index.template.php, which is probably the ultimate in convenience if anyone wants that (ie: if they prefer different menus on different devices, or whatever).

4/ Try to reinstate the whole kaboodle from 2.0, which is also possible but (IIRC) a bit more frigging around.

If I was going to do sidebars I'd them with this functionality: Topic: Advanced sidebar menus
That's basically just restyling the existing drop menu functionality to fit it to a sidebar.

Sir Osis of Liver

Quote from: Antechinus on July 15, 2019, 07:24:52 PM
Yep, piece of cake if you really want to do it.

Easy for you to say. ???  But thanks for the info, I'll get around to looking at this sooner or later.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Antechinus

Lol. What I meant was if you are keen to do this I wouldn't mind dragging out some files and taking a look. :D

Sir Osis of Liver

Yeah, if you have some time to kill, it would be a big help.  Been doing some tinkering with 2.1 to fix some things I don't like, but this is a bit ambitious for me, moreso to keep it responsive.  Whenever you can get around to it.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Antechinus

#5
The responsive thing would have to come down to hiding the sidebar on narrow screens, with click activation to bring it into view as an overlay. Not much else you could do. I assume (can't actually remember) this is why they decided to kill it. Should be easy to do with jQuery. It can even be done with mutant varieties of CSS, although that tends to annoy the semantics types, but it's fun to annoy them sometimes.

How serious do you want to get with this? Out of the list of four options in my first reply, which comes closest to what you were thinking of?

ETA: Just updated my local to RC2 (was still on Beta 4) and took a look. Umm. The menu handling on small screens works, but is a tad gruesome.  The basic container is ok, but the contents are very jumpity and WTF-ish. I can see why you're not keen on it. It'd drive me bonkers. Does it even work on touchscreen yet? (Do not have touchscreen handy, so can't check).

Anyway, it should be easy enough to just hijack that since it's really only a sidebar overlay anyway, albeit a particularly evil little variant of such. But that's just presentation. Not a biggy.

Sir Osis of Liver

Basically I'm just trying to create a 2.1 variant that's more to my liking so I can offer it in good conscience to forums I support who are intent on upgrading when 2.1 goes final.  A toggle for sidebars as in 2.0 would be nice, but I can go with just replacing dropdowns with sidebars.  The clunky navigation in mobile view is not a major concern, that's a theme issue, I'm sure there will be a good selection of responsive themes when final is released.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Kindred

working on porting my modifications to Bloc's Studio003 theme for 2.0.x to 2.1

got this much done just modifying the CSS

https://test2.turtleshellprod.com/

still got some work to do, especially to introduce the theme color variant chooser... but this was actually remarkably simple so far.
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Antechinus

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on July 17, 2019, 12:19:23 PMBasically I'm just trying to create a 2.1 variant that's more to my liking so I can offer it in good conscience to forums I support who are intent on upgrading when 2.1 goes final.  A toggle for sidebars as in 2.0 would be nice, but I can go with just replacing dropdowns with sidebars.

It's not a big deal to get a toggle. It's just an extra setting, on Profile.template.php IIRC (haven't checked for 2.1 equivalent yet). I'll have a think about the best way to tackle the markup. 2.0 replaced the lot according to the profile setting, which is probably overkill but could save on descendants in the CSS.


QuoteThe clunky navigation in mobile view is not a major concern, that's a theme issue, I'm sure there will be a good selection of responsive themes when final is released.

In theory, yes, but OTOH it would be nice to have it not clunky by default. Menus really are not difficult things. I haven't tested how it behaves on a touchscreen but in a narrow window on desktop the menu is close to unusable. Arguably that's not the intended use case, but it's still quite a handy thing to have sorted if you're working in multiple windows on desktop.

Come to think of it, I'd be inclined to have click or hover activation as options too. I'm not that keen on hover-activated drop menus.

Must say I'm missing the quick login bar from 2.0. It's annoying having to click through an extra link just to log in to the site. I'd be looking at modding that too if I was using 2.1 regularly.

Sir Osis of Liver

Quote from: Antechinus on July 17, 2019, 07:48:28 PM
Must say I'm missing the quick login bar from 2.0. It's annoying having to click through an extra link just to log in to the site. I'd be looking at modding that too if I was using 2.1 regularly.

You mean like this?
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Antechinus

Yeah that. Ok, where did they hide the setting? I looked everywhere and couldn't find it. :D

Sir Osis of Liver

Pasted it in from 2.0.  Also got rid of the jquery user menu, moved Profile and Messages back into main menu.  I don't like having multiple menus of different types all over the page, makes it difficult to find things.  Check your pms, I've set up an account for you.  Made another (obvious) change in the post/pm editors.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Irisado

Topic split as suggested during the discussion and is now over here.  Let's leave this topic to discuss the actual issue only.
Soñando con una playa donde brilla el sol, un arco iris ilumina el cielo, y el mar espejea iridescentemente

Arantor

Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on July 17, 2019, 09:56:01 PM
Pasted it in from 2.0.  Also got rid of the jquery user menu, moved Profile and Messages back into main menu.  I don't like having multiple menus of different types all over the page, makes it difficult to find things.  Check your pms, I've set up an account for you.  Made another (obvious) change in the post/pm editors.


So what did you do with the alerts? Did you jam that into the main menu as well?

Sir Osis of Liver

Haven't looked at alerts feature yet, so I left it in userinfo block.

Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Arantor

Unfortunately you lose the best part of it, that you have to click on it and go to another page to see its content.

Sir Osis of Liver

Well, no, it drops the jquery box, just like the button.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Arantor

I have to ask, what was so terrible about having the profile + messages menus that did the same kind of thing to be consistent?

Sir Osis of Liver

I didn't change it because it was terrible, I removed it because it split up basic navigation among different menus of different types.  You have the dropmenu from username, two different buttons next to it, the main menu above board index, and the Unread/Updated text links below that floated right.  Navigation is all over the place.  You know where everything is because you built it, but the typical user who's never seen it before and is only interested in content, not learning new forum tricks, will have an annoying time using it, and difficulty finding links they don't use regularly.  Makes things a lot simpler to use if it's all out front in one place (like sidebar menus), you don't have to hunt around looking for things.  It's not as elegant from a coding standpoint, but you're not building it for coders, it needs to be dumbed down for the vast majority of users who don't know or care what's under the hood.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Arantor

There's this amazing new website called Facebook where they put the user profile, messages and notifications at the top of the screen, away from the content. I think that little startup Twitter does it too.

I'd argue it's more familiar to users than not at this point. And it emphasises the site content, of which a user profile is not really related to... that's about you, not the site content.

It wasn't just because I thought it was trendy or edgy that I moved it, it was because this is how user interfaces have been built for the last decade.

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