Redesign of the board management!

[Nordoelum]

Greetings,

First of all I want to thank you for an wonderfull free forum solution that beats the crap outa phpBB

But to be seriouse, the board management really, really need a redesign. It is wery clumbsy to make new board. And to know wherever they are a category or not. And it looks awefull.

Hopefully you will take my advise, and make the board management easier to use

[klumy]

can you be more specific?

[Nordoelum]

Comparerd to IPB, SMF really suck. I haven't notised any other downsides with SMF yet. But the board management is so difficult to make category/forum/sub-forum  and rearrange them afterwards. It really need a change. I must admit that SMF is a great forum, but the board management can make a person to hesitage..

I might make a comparison soon, så you see what I mean.

[Nakitomimaru]

While I can't agree that the board admin area 'sucks', I would agree that it could use some improvement.  For instance, as was mentioned by Nordoelum, adding new boards, especially if you need to add a number of them quickly, is clumsy.  To a point this is required, especially if you have a complex permissions structure.  But if you're adding just a bunch of similar child boards, for instance - say:

-Popular Anime
--A
--B
--C
--D
--E
--F

It'd be nice if you didn't have to go through and not only manually set each as being a child of Popular Anime, but have to go through all the other options - if they could, indeed, simply inherit their permissions directly from Popular Anime?

The other area is moving boards around.  This one is really cumbersome, as if you have a lot of boards they all tend to kinda flow together.  That's only compounded if you need to re-arrange large numbers - using the above example, say if you were to go back and add boards I, J, G, Z, K and wanted to put them in alphabetical order.

Granted these are somewhat extreme examples, but hopefully they illustrate the point reasonably so.  Actually, I rather think that the board administration area might be an ideal place for the use of a little AJAX - it'd wickedly speed up re-arranging boards especially, and it shouldn't be too hard to add icons next to board names to be used for adding either 'Place Board After...' or 'Child Of' boards similar to the Quick-Modify links currently in use on RC2?

I've been nothing but pleased with SMF since upgrading from phpBB, and as it is the board admin area is pretty good.  It just, as mentioned, could use a little sprucing up.

[Nordoelum]

Hey Nakitomimaru 

I miss wrote my last post Ouch! I didn't ment SMF suck compared to IPB, just only the board management section...

Damn this was miss wroted Sorry SMF communtiy...

[Ben_S]

What version are you using, things are a bit different in 1.1/

[Nordoelum]

What version are you using, things are a bit different in 1.1/

SMF 1.1 RC2

So the different can't be that big, or is it a new release allready?

Access it here: http://smf.frac.dk
un: admin
pw: laks

[Ben_S]

By 1.1 I mean 1.1 RC2.

How does IPB do it better?

[Nordoelum]

By 1.1 I mean 1.1 RC2.

How does IPB do it better?

So what you are saying now is that you thing the board management is okay? So you like that it might be a litle difficult? I am not trying to offend you in any way.

It is much easier to as said before make category/forum/sub-forum. And rearrange them afterward. Its should only be arrows in the main frame, not open a new window. And etc.

[Ben_S]

I'm saying I personally have never had a problem using it and am asking how IPB does it that is so much better as I  have never admined an IPB board and have no desire to do so in the near future .

Maybe some screen shots would help?

[Nordoelum]

Add some screens soon. But the demo thing at IPS.com was malfunction

[H]

I tried an IPB trial once and an ASP board when I ran my site on Windows. I found both of them where harder to use than SMF