Check this out. Replaced the "Administration Panel" outer block of 11 elements with just 3 divs and a simple link.

https://github.com/miqrogroove/xmb/commit/c0aff5b6ca6447b631...

I woke up happy enough, and then I saw this.

THANK YOU.



Doubt it'd be too difficult to convert the rest of the templates to the tableless system either. I should spin up a test instance but with my habit of not doing anything, well.

Here's the entire admin_panel.php template refactor.

https://github.com/miqrogroove/xmb/commit/b682ec3a9bca62893c...

This one was a little more painful. Had to figure out how to collapse borders and flex the rows in a way that isn't ugly. Tested border width and table width theme settings and nothing broke after that.

Looks decent on my phone too.

Tried something similar with the attachment search form in the admin panel. I learned we need to use grid instead of flex whenever the rows are best displayed as rows. This concept probably applies to most of the XMB tables that have multiple rows in them.

There is one more push coming tonight to finish those first 6 items of the admin panel. Some of the patterns are getting easier. The style sheet needs more comments to help me reduce panic scrolling during file edits.

There are clear tradeoffs between extensibility and maintainability here. Maybe it's my lack of experience with CSS. It feels like more class names means it will be easier to customize, but also means there will be more CSS changes required for each added feature in the future.

https://github.com/miqrogroove/xmb/blob/af041b7c1d199d96db3b...

Code:

span[class^="status_"] { color: <?= $THEME['tabletext'] ?>; font-size: <?= $THEME['font-smaller-1'] ?>; }

I love that you went out the way to do it like this

I feel like labelling every single thing is a little bit over-the-top when most things are probably going to look very similar or even identical to one another.

However if I'm not wrong it does actually help with the page content semantics - so it's not a bad way to do things from that point of view.

What exactly did you need commented, specifically?

I think that regex isn't even new... looks like something front page related. Currently the admin panel parts are done through Members search and next up will be User Ranks. I wish it was quick and easy but it's taking an hour or two of HTML and CSS changes per section. Yes they are just tables, but every table had a slightly different layout.

Recent thoughts on removing all the HTML tables:

ChatGPT suggested using a CSS property named box-sizing to help simplify all the outer borders and margins of the tables and grids. What it failed to tell me is that it has no effect in Transitional XHTML. I wish it was easier like that, but it's not.

I've finished all of the admin panel pages so far except for the Database Tools. This now includes the header and footer templates, so the pages are fully converted from tables to divs and even look better on hidpi devices.

If this turns out to be a success before I give up, then the template-refactor branch could be renamed so that it becomes the v1.12 development branch some day. In the meantime it's a work in progress, so I'm not doing any merges to or from that branch.

Quote:

What it failed to tell me is that it has no effect in Transitional XHTML. I wish it was easier like that, but it's not.

Gotta love AI when it doesn't tell you stuff or just simply makes assumptions. Does this mean we'll have to stick with a tabular layout, or is it still 'workable', it's just harder? (I'd obviously suggest the obvious and to look into revamping for HTML5-style stuff, since we already use a lot more modern CSS nowadays here, but whether it's doable I'm not sure)

Quote:

I've finished all of the admin panel pages so far except for the Database Tools. This now includes the header and footer templates, so the pages are fully converted from tables to divs and even look better on hidpi devices.

Well, that's all good. :3

Quote:

If this turns out to be a success before I give up, then the template-refactor branch could be renamed so that it becomes the v1.12 development branch some day. In the meantime it's a work in progress, so I'm not doing any merges to or from that branch.

Seems to be turning out pretty good so far. I don't think it's worth giving up. It's a lot of work.

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One thing that really bugs me by the way - you should be able to disable the 'friendly' redirect pages on successful actions. For some forms like the IP ban one we could just reload the form but with the 'success' message somewhere idk. Can't actually explain what I mean.

The box sizing property can potentially eliminate some of the nesting effects of the table borders. Without it, the browser treats a border as being outside of each box, rather than inside. When we allow themes to have variable border widths, it then requires an edge offset using margin properties to prevent all the boxes from growing and moving around willy nilly. It's an extremely fiddly language by default. I think it's best to stay on Transitional for the exact reason we used it: All the existing tables are full of attributes that don't exist in modern HTML, and we have to leave them enabled until they are all removed from the templates.

One quirk I've noticed is in the way you format threads in the patches section: you seem to have a habit of using a form of thread tagging, despite XMB not supporting it: https://forums.xmbforum2.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=440

This could be useful for thread filtering, couldn't it? :3 A dropdown selector that you can scroll through on the forums page (or collectively being able to go to a thread list based on tags for all forums across the board), would be pretty useful as well.

Feel like it might even have been discussed many years ago in the early days of this site, or might have been an old code hack for the 1.9.11 series. I'd have to look

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Oh, I forgot to reply to the post huh.
Okay, fair. Breaking everything for the sakes of using a CSS property is probably not a good idea right now. (And tell me about it about HTML/CSS being inherently janky... ugh)