Here's Ket's code in action with a super simple html form you can plug any lodestone ID in to.

Lodestone IDs to try
Caduceus: 1875454
Ketrebu: 1002799
Whisp: 1314826

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Nice Cad, I was just running it locally on my own computer with QPHP, so I didn't put any formatting or anything into it. It needs some <br> tags and stuff.

So anyhow, now that we can get Lodestone data, how do you guys think we should be displaying it?

Personally I want to keep it rather minimal, instead of having these giant sigs that are just as big as most people's posts.

I like the idea of just showing the top X or so under people's avatars. But a thin single line auto-sig might look ok too. I'll mock some pics up in a few minutes I think.

(PS: Bare in mind that the new forum isn't likely to look exactly like this one, these mockups are just what it'd look like here.)

Here's what I mean by putting the job icons under people's avatars. I prefer this idea, personally. It doesnt show the Physical Level in this particular mock up but it wouldn't be that hard to add. Though I think it'll probably be kind of pointless in a month or two when basically everybody is Level 50 anyway.



Or we could just have a string of job icons as people's signatures. I don't like this one as much, it looks a little messy. Could be because I don't have a fancy banner box to put them in like most sig generators but I find them to be wasted space. I had to make the "profile shot" bigger for this because you can't really see it as a 32x32 icon.



Nothing stops us putting tooltips on these to show the job name or have it so the player name appears when you hover over their picture, or whatever.

If anybody thinks that showing 10+ jobs in one place like this will get messy then I'd suggest that we only show the top X number of jobs (like in the first picture I only show 6) or only show jobs that are Rank 20 or above. Since everybody levels a bit of every job, it's probably worth hiding any jobs below 20.

The real point of us doing this stuff ourselves is that we can make it look any way we want. Just need people to tell us how they'd like it to appear. Suggestions, ideas, comments people!

Atheistically speaking putting them underneath the avatar looks better, but it will make each post longer. Also you have Ridere who is going to want to showcase all his Rank 50 jobs in a couple of months, so you might have to consider making more than six spots available.

I think putting them in the signature might be the best way to go. Just the jobs though--I don't think you need to put physical levels unless people want it. I'll look at this some more after work.

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based on looks alone, i like the first one better, but the 2nd one is fine too. nice job!
any way to replace the roster thread with automatic values like these?

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

Yeah Whisp, thats exactly what we can do. With the new forum (that we don't have yet) anyway.

We'll have the server periodically refreshing people's levels using the Lodestone (nightly or something) and then we can make a roster page that you can group by job, and choose to order by rank. I'd probably make a roster page that lists everyone along with their top X number of jobs, sorta like the sigs but not as big. And then make tabs or something for DoW, DoM, DoH, DoL that lists the jobs and shows everybody over 20 in that job.

I don't think the "people's posts will be longer" is that big of a deal. I mean, most people have one of these big generated signatures already. And Whisp's already got two massive signatures under his posts. Posts won't be getting much bigger. We can strip off stuff like people's forum join date too.

Ultimately we could make it so you choose what jobs appear under your avatar. We could have just 3 (instead of 6) and make it so you pick exactly which job to show in each box. Wouldn't be that difficult.

But yeah I think its kind of pointless to add Physical Level to this. We'll still track it, and we can show it on the roster or if you click on them or something, but everyone will be 50 eventually and its just not that important sadly.

When I originally envisioned this, I assumed the graphics would be much smaller, if not completely non-existant. I suppose given both of the sig generators now, however, people probably wouldn't be happy with a simple "THM40 WVR32 TAN26" system. I guess I don't feel super passionately about it. I'm more worried about what I'll mention next.

I think we all know that most of us won't have a single 50; we'll most likely have multiple. In fact many of us (Myself and Madi for sure) aren't even going to main job the one we'll hit 50 on first. Madi wants to be a summoner/pet class, and I'll most likely revert to a different mage class when they are available. Because of that, whichever system we choose, I think we should allow members to decide how they want their classes to appear. So unless we have a way to display all classes, I strongly suggest we have the ability to alter our own order later.

Edit: Ket covered it above.

PS: Still think we should house a lot of this stuff on an actual site-site. Otherwise we're just going to have tons of pop up pages with no real graphical tie-in to the forums where people fill out forms to configure data.

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Those are just the 32x32 job icons ripped straight from the Lodestone itself. I didn't really want to go to the trouble of editing them, but I guess we could resize them a little. There's no real reason we couldn't make them smaller, but you risk covering them up with the number and then its not really useful information anymore.

So as an attempt to compromise all the suggestions so far, how about this:



Icons are 20% smaller, gives us room to put 4. Moved the numbers down slightly so they don't cover up the icon, but don't spill onto another line and take up even more space. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, making it possible to choose what icons you want under your avatar isn't outside the realm of possibility.

As for the PS Rid, I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about. But if you mean that our "configuration" pages people will have to fill out to make this work (ie: Somewhere to post your Lodestone ID, somewhere to choose what order your icons appear in, etc) then there's absolutely no reason it can't be made to be part of the normal forum member profile.

These boards already support custom profile fields (you add them from the admin panel) and also nothing stops you just editing the PHP pages. If I remember correctly they even have something you can include at the top of your own pages to make your page take on the forum's site and header, along with all login credentials checked and verified, etc etc.

To illustrate, the other day I installed phpBB3 on a server of mine to see what it was like. Between my last post and now, I was able to very quickly add the following to the site's user profile stuff.



It doesn't save or anything, and I didn't bother adding a bunch of job selection boxes, but you get the idea. It gets nicely integrated into the site if you want it to be. You don't actually edit their PHP pages, you just write your own class the way they want it to be written, and set it to appear on the user's profiles.

For what it's worth, I like the revised vision better. Would we be making the botton 15% transparent and then just doing the numbers "floating above" it with an HTML layer, or would we be doing some on-the-fly graphic creation system using php? I've not looked into the latter much, to be honest.

And yah, we can do the configuration in the profile page for the forums, since that's a forum feature, and it'd be more intuitive. I was referring more to the pages that whisp would go to in order to generate the lists of top crafters/ranks, divided up and all that. Maybe that, too, can be modified in some portion of the forum code.

I guess I'm just not completely sold on the idea that putting 100% of our tools and data the forum is a good. I'm still fighting for both a site and a forum. With the ability to be able to strip data from the lodestone, I see a lot of neat functionality that would be available with class searches, member/roster listings and all that. Having guests coming into our site and just being thrown to a forum seems a bit of an introverted approach.

I'm probably the odd man out in this argument, given the general responses from people here, so I won't argue too much for it, but I'll keep bringing it up on occasion :p And once we get access set up, I may slap the code on the server, anyway, even if I end up being the only one using it. heh.

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There's a lot of easy CSS trickery to float numbers over the icons like that. Quickest and easiest is probably to make each job a table cell, with that job's icon set as the cell's non-repeating background image. Then you can just put the number inside the cell itself, with sufficient padding-top to make the number appear where you want it.

That doesn't get the nicely formatted numbers though. Using standard web fonts and getting them to be easily visible (white with black outline) and still look the same on all browsers would either be really difficult or quite a mess. You could make each possibly number an image, but that's a lot of image requests per page refresh. You can use some more CSS trickery though to get the same effect. You can make a single big image with all numbers 1 to 99 in it, then you make fixed size divs for the digits that set different background-position values depending on which numbers they want to show. A lot of sites use this trick when they need to show lots and lots of button icons but don't want clients calling the server for 30-40 button images every single page refresh.

I'm in an illustrative mood, so, take a picture like this with all the numbers in it (this static picture is tiny for what it is, 3K only)



Then you have a DIV of a fixed size with this image as it's background. Then set background-position: "0px 165px;" and the div will show the number 16. The picture is a PNG so it'll overlap the job icon (which is a table cell background) without obscuring it fine.

EDIT: And as for the other pages, I'm pretty certain you are able to completely write your own PHP pages if you want. All you do is add one line of code to the top and one at the bottom to wrap the forum code around yours. Then you get access to all of it's user verification stuff, login stuff, group permissions for whoever is logged in, etc etc. That adds the site's banner to your pages too.

Basically, if you really really want to make an announcements page, or a members page, or whatever else, you can do so and just pop those two lines in to make the page look the same as the forum.

Sounds like a plan, then.

We really need to get the ball rolling on this forum upgrade, since that's going to be the foundation for any of these changes. Then we can work on the layout/appearance and get all the features going.

Yarr, let's get these FTP accounts set up!

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I originally edited this into my last post, but then saw you posted, so i took it out and putting it here instead:

Disclaimer: It's not quite this simple, I believe you're meant to make it as two separate files, a php file and a template html file for styles, but this is the general gist of it..

Basically, you make your very own PHP page like this:



And you get this:



Then bare in mind you're able to edit the header as well, it's just a template, so you can add your own menu items and such. And I guess if you really really felt so inclined you could rename index.php to forum.php and make your own front-page index.php.

Pretty sure this is how all of the ready-made forum "portals" are made.

I like the 4 icons under the avatar. It keeps it neat and without taking up an extraordinary amount of space. If the join date carries over, I'd personally like to keep it if possible. If the boards become a big hub again, it will show that we've been around a while.

You guys are doing an awesome job with all of these ideas, keep up the great work!

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[In Yarr we trust.]

Today, lets talk about styles!

The theme we use for our current board no longer exists, there is no phpBB3 version of it. That said, I personally want the new boards to look as close to this one did as possible. It's been a home for some of us for the past 6-7 years, we don't need to change the general style. I like the light colors (don't like dark colored forums, hard to read imo) and the centered style in particular. That said, the look still needs an update or two. In particular, it's about high time we moved on to at least 1024 width. 800 width is pretty damn small as far as today's screen resolutions go.

I believe this theme was based on "subsilver", and there happens to be a "subsilver2" for phpBB3. So I've been modifying it a little to get it to look like this site on a test server of mine. I'll post a picture when I'm done fiddling but I figured it's worth asking if people feel the same. (ie: The site should stay looking like it is despite the upgrade)

I do like this color scheme. Something sort of "tame" is preferred for me. Striking color changes and whatnot tend to be rather distracting. So if there's a similar-looking style, I'm fine with that.

All that being said, we're not even 100% certain that we can upgrade to phpbb3. I think we're still missing a crucial first step in the sense that we need to get those FTP accounts created. At least then we can upgrade the forums over on a different sub-domain (/forums/ perhaps), while this one is still functioning just fine. And then we can work on styles and everything from there.

Yarr, make this happen, prease!

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I'd definitely do it if given access, however you basically need Yarr's account information and the site he logs into since it's not just the FTP you'll be messing with but also the MySQL database, and I'm not sure he'd be willing to give that out :P

I'm sure there's ways around the above, but it would be annoying and more work than just going off his host's control panel.

Just spent like 4-5 hours (admittedly most of it was working out how their template system works) trying to make the default "subsilver2" in phpBB3 look like this site. Plus I added an extra little bar at the top to show the leve timer a bit more minimalistic and shoved the user profile stuff up there too.

Didn't come out too bad. Not completely done and will probably never look exactly the same, but:

Looks good Ket, I actually like that better than what we have now.

Someone make Yarr stop playing shitty betas and pay attention to us :P

I thought about this. I think it might be possible to just upload a copy of phpMyAdmin to the FTP and run it there. You could get the IP, username and password for the database itself from the config files for this board.

That way you shouldn't need access to the host control panel. Which is the riskiest thing to give out because you'd be basically handing the entire hosting account over.

Im trying to check with my host to see if i can give access to someone else, with out giving them total access to just redo the secret answer and password.

Althought I will be honest. I dont think Ket or Kayne would do anything to fuck me or this site over. I know you guys respect that I pay for this site 100% from my own pocket and that I dont setup adds to make money too.

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i lold

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But I would, eh?! I see how it is.

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nah I am sure Yarr can trust an idiot like <point at self> ME!

edit: Nice job Ket its coming pretty well!

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I like it! I never liked the default style, or other styles I saw, for phpbb3. I think it would be great if we could keep the current style of the forum. I think I'm also sold on having the icons under the avatars; it looks better that way, and leaves the signature place clear.

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