Amigans.net 2022 updates

Hello everyone,
As you may know, I am working on a forum update for some time now, and I prepared the first batch of changes. This will give us the option to move to newer code for our beloved website, and keep it a secure and safe place for all of us.

I wanted to let you know that tomorrow, Wednesday 16th of February, after 7:30 UTC/8:30 CET, Amigans.net will be down for about an hour, maybe less.

Before any change or update I will take a backup of everything, so to be sure that if something goes wrong, I will be able to revert all the changes and bring the website back.

After the update, I will need you to test the forum and inform me of any problems, as soon as possible. If you will be able to post, do it in this thread.

This is the first step of a few updates that are coming soon.

@walkero

Nice, thank you for all the work.

Could you, if time permits, share some of the upcoming changes?

Love to read about new stuff

@Raziel
Absolutely.

Currently, our website is using for the forum a module named X-Forum with version 5.85 (04/10/2012), which is quite old and no update was released after that. Although it is quite secure and we didn't have major issues all these years, it has has two major disadvantages:
1. Is not developed anymore and there is no update path for newer versions of Xoops, which is the CMS this website is based on.
2. It doesn't work with PHP 7, forcing us to remain to the very old PHP 5.

What we decided to do is to move to another module, which is NewBB 5.0 Final released in 2019 (https://github.com/XoopsModules25x/newbb) which is still in active development and work even on the latest PHP 8 and Xoops 2.5 that we are using.

The work needed for that was to create a clear path on how to move the thousands of posts from X-Forum to NewBB, since there is no automated way to do it, unfortunately. So, I have to do it manually through SQL queries.

Also, the theme code changed completely, so I needed to recreate the look we have. Unfortunately, this new version will not have the fixes for IBrowse, which are going to be added later.

All the above are going to be applied tomorrow, as well as upgrading the used PHP to 7. That might influence other parts of the website, although I haven't seen any major problems from my tests.

Ouch! What a Pain!

@walkero

Thanks a lot for the insight

Great work Walkero!!

Thanks!

Looks great Walkero!

Thank you!

-Slygon

Thank you guys for your tests and instant feedback.

Everyone, please test it and give me your feedback in this thread. If you don't like anything from the changes, please tell me so as well.

Just to let you all know, I changed the font and I also increased it by 1 point, so to make things a little bit more easy to read.

Looking forward to hearing from you all.

Working so far, small facelift too, nice

Cool!

First issue: the topic can't be read without logging in. Saying you have no access. After logging in all is fine.

Another issue is that there is still a problem with commenting out under the news: Carriage returns didn't take into account by default. And all the answers are written in one big long line. Like "wrap the enters" is not enabled by default. That only happens under the "news" comment, in the forums all ok by default.

Quote:

And dunno if it was possible before, but imbedding of youtube works too:

@walkero

Images aren't shown in the image database (though that might be because it wasn't migrated yet)?

Selecting the pull-down menu of the categories here informs about a bunch of pictures in their subcategories, but choosing any of them will always end up with
Quote:

Quote:

Fixed... Thank you for reporting it.

Quote:

I didn't change anything on that yet. I plan one of the future updates to change the whole news section with something newer and better as well.

Quote:

That's awesome.

Quote:

Unfortunately, I haven't done anything on this section yet. This is the next thing I am going to fix, as long as the forum is working fine.

The images album module is also blocking us from moving to newer versions of PHP. So, I plan to fix it as soon as possible.

I noticed one snag so far: It doesn't look like my Forum Settings are being used. I had set the number of items to display on the main page to 30, but now it only displays 15 (the default?).

Best regards,

Niels

@niels
Yeah. This was not transferred, but I will look into bringing it back, if possible.

@walkero

Thank you for all the work you put into making it look like you hardly did anything!

A few notes:

o Clicking on the "Reminder to people trying to register on the website" link gives a "Selected module does not exist!" message.

o Replying to a forum post no longer automatically inserts the name of the post's author at the top.

o Being able to embed YouTube videos is cool!

o Not a strong objection, but I'm not a big fan of the new quoted text display. It wastes a lot of space with the large double-quote image and all the white space around the quote. The orange bar at the left seems to give too much emphasis to quotes. And putting 'Quote:' at the top seems redundant, though perhaps it's useful if you're using a screen reader.

@msteed

Quote:

Fixed.

Quote:

Yeah, you are right. I will try to bring this back.
Have in mind that there is a button, close to submit button, that quotes the previous comment into your new one.

Quote:

I see what you mean. Let's see what others feel about it and we can decide if we want to remove it or not.
The wording "Quote:" on top of it is also necessary for the IBrowse, where the CSS is not working.

@George
After a while, i think msteed is right about "too big quote image". At first, that looks good and fresh, but as we there discuss things pretty heavy, and often quote a lot, it indeed uses a lot of space for nothing.

At least maybe a good start will be to just remove the quote image at top of the quote, and live with that a little bit. Then if there will be needs, reduce the spaces at the top/bottom of the quote as well.

PS. Btw, also found an issue that was there and before and now, with code/code tags: the first line always didn't parse spaces correctly, and always start from the very beginning of the line.

PS2. Also, by default, the "answer" text editor window is too small. Can it be made a little bit bigger ?

@kas1e
Quote:
I will have a look but I am not sure there is a lot that can be done. You see, the way I like to do the changes, I try to not hack the modules too much because that prevents an easy update later.
I will see if there is a way to do it in a clean way.

Quote:
Are you talking about the one that is at the bottom of the page, to the one that is on the reply page, after you press the "Reply" button?
If I am not wrong, both of them can be resized when you want to write something in there, right?

@all
All your comments so far are noted and on my to-do list. Probably I will do small updates as soon as possible.

@George
Yeah, that one when you hit "reply" (like i do now). It's just too small by default, and i need to resize it always.

@George
Actually, all reply windows are small everywhere now by default (i mean too small), and we need to resize it always.

Btw, is it possible to fix a bit code/code tags too, so, it will be possible to insert just a few lines of the code with those tags, without adding a lot of extra space till some minimum value (it seems minimum value is something like 24 lines or so).