MyBB Community Forums

LeeFish.nl is a site I made to try to get to grips with the mybb forum software. I posted some items I had made for the sims game as a start so I would have some content - it has kind of spiralled since then.

There are now 4 people making things for the sims2 and sims3 games and each of them has an area of their own with a custom theme (all are running off the same template set). Its interesting to see how the themes all look pretty different, though I see it could be confusing for people.

The board is heavily customised, mainly due to ZingaBurga's awesome XThreads plugin. My biggest mistake (I think) was putting the forum in a sub-directory. We have a fair few links on other sites, so I am reluctant to change it, though I guess its doable with a redirect.

Home page: http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/portal.php
Example of customised forum (sunglasses advised ) http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/forum-14-page-2.html

Looking good, Lee! XThreads is totally awesome!

I like the way you have intregated the homepage with the forums, however I don't like the style of the forums.

I love your site, i should join if i can find my Sims CD :p

xthreads all the way

(2011-01-27, 02:40 PM)aglioeolio Wrote: [ -> ]xthreads all the way

Ditto...great job Lee !

(2011-01-27, 02:11 PM)iGeorge Wrote: [ -> ]I like the way you have intregated the homepage with the forums, however I don't like the style of the forums.

Can you explain what you mean George? Do you mean the colours I have chosen or the layouts of the forums, or do you mean the index layout? That has always worried me a bit.

There's a lot to like there. Colors, layout, graphics. I got a little confused, though. For example, when I click on the book shelf I expected to see messages but I got what looks like a portal. So I had to figure out what to do with that. Maybe I'm just not used to this kind of set up. But the place looks great. I especially like your fish idea with the fish graphics.

Yea Andrew, I know what you mean - this is actually where I *think* I may have gone a bit too far with the customisation - people are used to a certain layout/look on a bulletin board - and I worry that on leefish instead of thinking "hey nice" they think "what the hell is this? Where is everything? Who is this lunatic. Bah" - and leave, never to return.......

I did a lot of updates on leefish - still heavily XThreaded and I have added a couple of neat bits to the theme:

Prototype Powered Modal Login Box
Prototype Powered Modal User Control Panel
Prototype Powered popup Quick Reply - with options to "go advanced" to full post editor
A css dropdown menu
New logo.

General tidy up of the HTML, in 99% of pages we get a valid result on the validator: the only fails are due to a couple of MYCodes that need tweaking and a fault in the wiki.php format. All custom templates pass. Next up is the css, removing all non css3 code and taking the site to full css3 compliance.

On the portal we have a jQuery powered set of sliders showing images from the db. The portal page is cached using memcache to keep db hits to a minimum.

The whole site is gzipped, so I would appreciate input on loading times: prototype, scriptaculous.effects and jquery are running from google cdn.

Home page: http://www.leefish.nl/mybb/portal.php