Metanet Forums

Rather than creating a whole new style, I think I'll work on improving this one. Feel free to help out.

So! First up:

In order to give the skin a bit more contrast, could we change the background for posts to the colour 19063b, put the title gradient (attached) in the section with the username and post subject at the top of each post, and the bottom gradient (also attached) in the section with the edit and quote buttons, at the bottom of each post? The result should look something like this, which I think is a lot nicer.

Also, the online/offline images are awful (and orange). If anyone wants to make replacements, that would be great. Make sure they're either different colours, or that the online one is brighter than the offline one. That doesn't seem to be the case currently and it irks me.

EDIT: In the list of other things which should be easily fixed, I just noticed that it's difficult to see the borders in nested quotes, because the background and borders are almost identical shades of grey. Make the borders lighter, please. It might also be better to make the title text for quotes white or light grey, rather than the current dark grey, but that's less of an issue since it's still quite readable.

t'would be nice to have some orange rather than purple, and a little more contrast. i like the hashing though, not smooth gradients..
id make it so that everything is square, not rounded, as the only things that seem to be are some of the select images.
i think it may be better if instead of making the post area purple, you made it the same as the text-fields backgrounds, although maybe with 3px gaps between the lighter colours.. i really like the text-based everything of the new forums though.
i might get to work on the online/offline things.

Geti wrote:t'would be nice to have some orange rather than purple

Yeah, I'm currently using the FiProBlack style, and I like it - it uses orange and black/grey as its main colors, which looks pretty nice, not to mention that it keeps it consistent with NUMA.

Oh, by the way, why is it called mergenine: orange style if it's mainly purple and black?

Atilla's suggestions for adding more contrast are definitely good, but I agree that some orange would work well.

PsychoSnail wrote:Oh, by the way, why is it called mergenine: orange style if it's mainly purple and black?

For irony's sake? To mess with our heads? It's a name, it doesn't have to describe the subject correctly, or even at all.

Great work Atilla, although I think it would look better with faint diagonal lines instead of a solid gradient. And as maestro said, some orange would look nice.

Another thing: the alignment of the user names and data. Either have it all left-justified or have it all centered, because at the moment it's uneven.

It was initially orange (like, everything which is currently purple was the same shade of bright orange) and we changed it to purple because we thought it looked better.

If you want orange instead of purple it might be better for you to work on the FiBlackPro skin, since it's already close to what you're looking for. Orange in addition to purple is a possibility, though I'm not sure how it'd work out.

Also, I did up some quick online/offline icons. Opinions?

i did some patterns for stuff like online/offline, but i lost motivation quickly, as you can see.
maybe could use lightened borders, but you can do that, right? ;)
attached.

Stripey gradients, for those who wanted them.

Oooooh, I like those ones. Nicely done.

Really nice, Atilla.
I'm currently using Hermes, BTW.

I like those, Atilla.
Anyone think that maybe orange would make it too halloween-esque? Or is that just me? Although whatever color we end up choosing, a more neon style than the pastel purple we have now would look very cool.

I was thinking that the title bars which currently use the black gradient could instead be orange. More of a light, bright orange, that is, not pumpkin orange. It'd be a bit of a break from the purple without making the whole skin orange. Not sure how well it'd go with the text, though... it might be a little difficult to read.

Atilla, those gradients you've used make the skin look twenty times better. I find it to be great in some respects, but just slightly tacky and "we got this from someone else's site" in others. Are you planning to release a full redo of the skin once you've addressed these small issues? I'd like to implement those gradients straight away, but don't know how.

KinGAleX wrote:Atilla, those gradients you've used make the skin look twenty times better. I find it to be great in some respects, but just slightly tacky and "we got this from someone else's site" in others. Are you planning to release a full redo of the skin once you've addressed these small issues? I'd like to implement those gradients straight away, but don't know how.

Unfortunately, neither do I. I'll try looking at the code and see what I can work out, though. Alternative is sorting everything out, then handing LV or someone a list of instructions.

I also want to fiddle around with things a bit more. Maybe splash a bit of orange around, and work on a title image.

Atilla wrote:

KinGAleX wrote:Atilla, those gradients you've used make the skin look twenty times better. I find it to be great in some respects, but just slightly tacky and "we got this from someone else's site" in others. Are you planning to release a full redo of the skin once you've addressed these small issues? I'd like to implement those gradients straight away, but don't know how.

Unfortunately, neither do I. I'll try looking at the code and see what I can work out, though. Alternative is sorting everything out, then handing LV or someone a list of instructions.

I also want to fiddle around with things a bit more. Maybe splash a bit of orange around, and work on a title image.

There's gonna be a problem with "handing LV or someone instructions", unless that someone is a non-mod. We really don't have the time, expertise, or energy to dedicate to that. We're gonna be modding the big PHP things on the forums or leading up other projects. If someone wants to do a new style, they're largely on their own. You can find out how to package styles on http://www.phpbb3styles.net/ by downloading one of their samples. If it's packaged this way, all we have to do is drag and drop.

How's this? I've included some orange as per request. I actually think the orange goes nicely with the purple background... better than it did with black.

Strangely, the title image appears to be dictated by the actual page code (in the div_id="logodesc" section) rather than the style CSS. This means I can't centre and size my image without screwing around with the index (index.htm in the base folder has the alterations I made to do it for the screenshot), so you might have to do that manually. Or someone who actually understands this stuff might have to figure out a work-around.

Also, I can't find where you'd put a gradient for the top and bottom row of the posts. I'm not sure if you can do that without affecting all tables, the way this is set up... still, I think it looks a *lot* better with the colours. I've used smooth gradients because the striped ones looked *really* odd, mostly because they didn't quite match up at the column borders. I might make a more subtle pattern if people want it, but personally I quite like the smooth ones.

There are a few other things that could probably be changed or improved, but I think it'll be easier to actually get what I've done implemented, and then identify the problems that way. It's difficult for me to single-handedly test every possible page without having an actual forum. And I think what I've done so far is still an improvement.

I've left the colours for the groups alone, since I'm pretty sure it's much easier to use the admin CP to change them, especially given our non-standard groups. If the admins could do those manually, that would be great.

Atilla, that looks stunning. The header is absolutely amazing, and the whole look is comes together so well. Really great work, I hope Dave approves. ;)

Atilla, I've uploaded your style as m9orange. It's a little wonky in the top banner.

I had to rename it in all 4 .cfg files. If you make any changes and reupload it, would you do that, too?

AlliedEnvy wrote:Atilla, I've uploaded your style as m9orange. It's a little wonky in the top banner.

That's more than a little wonky for me. It's been compressed horizontally and stretched vertically, whoch pushes the rest of the page down.

O_o

I can't even see the top banner in any of three browsers. There's not a space for it or anything. I assumed AE left it out due to technical issues.

Anyway, I *think* I found a mistake in one of the .cfg files which might explain it. All the other images are listed with *y*x, whereas I gave the banner *x*y. If you could replace the imageset .cfg file with this one, it should fix the skewed dimensions. The forum won't let me upload .cfg or .txt, so you'll have to unzip it instead.

The image will still probably be off-centre, though, due to the afore-mentioned problems with the index.htm determining its positioning. And I have no idea why it's not showing up for me.

Done. Looks good.

AlliedEnvy wrote:Done. Looks good.

Very good. Well done, Atilla :)

I caaaan't really say I'm a fan of the banner as it is. But things are lookin' good, for sure.

Astounding work. Atilla, good on ya for setting the bar on skinning.