I've used many other BBS systems over the past few years but was drawn to CS because it was written in .NET and Microsoft encouraged us to use it.
Now I know CS has a lot of nice features going for it, but the ability to customize it, or more correctly, the INABILITY to customize it is abhorrent. I just can't believe this software has been released for several versions and over a few years and still has no solution except the horrible techie "skinning" using low-level CSS style sheets.
The cgi/Perl BBS I used over 5 years ago had a really simply customization. Colors, logo, and basic layout changes could all be made from the "Control panel" webpages without having to be a nerd and understand anything about Perl, or html - let alone .NET, CSS, style sheets, and coding.
Why has CS (and the entire CS community) totally ignored this crucial feature?
It seems to me that a lot of effort has gone into relatively obscure and biazarre features, but this glaring omission is still not being handled.
Am I the only one that thinks Forum "Admins" are real people and not CSS programmers?
I am finding it really hard to hang on and not just ditch CS for phpBB, vBulletin, or any one of the many other good systems out there. It's really hard to keep explaining to potential users "yeah it sucks but it's written in .NET".
Yes, this is a fairly well known short-coming of CS. The skin/theme system is very, very flexible, performant, and scalable, which is what it was originally intended to be, but the learning curve is way too high.
A goal for CS 2.2 will be a completely new theme/skin engine to make things super, super simple. I believe we will still continue to support the current model too (it allows for the maximum amount of control). What we're going to do though is target the new skin/theme features as the 95% that just want something super easy to use and the current skin system to the 5% that need a really flexible system that allows for any kind of UI layout.
Yes and no. Part of the goal with the new skinning work we are planning out now is that (a) you won't require server access (b) you don't need to be a .NET developer. We want the new skinning system to be easily used by HTML/CSS designers, but also incorporate some really, really simple tools to help build the UI --- all with no server access. With server access you'd have the maximum amount of flexibility since you could modify the ASP.NET page/master-page itself.
We're somewhat putting the cart before the horse here though ---- the team has prototyped some ideas around how this will work, but we have to get CS 2.1 done first
I think you still don't "get it".
Your target user should be a "forum administrator" that does not know html, css, or design. Web designers can muddle through with the current or slightly improved skins stuff.
Where CS falls flat on it's face is providing easy customization for the real people that want to use it and don't want to pay designers hundreds or thousands to tweak it when alternative forums software can be tailored easily by the typical "office worker" type of forum admin.
No, believe me --- we do get it. But I don't think that was the original question, or perhaps I misunderstood it.
What you're proposing is some simple tools that allow anyone to go into the backend and pick colors, styles, etc. using some simple tools, e.g. color picker. For example to change the background color you go to the control panel and pick a color and click save. That is something we have discussed as well.
So now a new skinning model is going to be CS2.2? It was proposed not to be until 3.0, correct? This would be very cool as long as, as you mentioned, both systems are supported. There are absolutly applications for both systems and having both I believe would take Community Server above and behind a lot of other apps. Also, please please please allow for changing the whole theme without having to rename your theme default. Please have a site wide setting that will just change the theme of the site! This would make life a lot easier even with the current skinning methods.
Thanks again for a great product! Please just don't forget about the little people as you guys develop for Microsoft, Dell, Match.com, etc.
madkidd: Thanks again for a great product! Please just don't forget about the little people as you guys develop for Microsoft, Dell, Match.com, etc.
Never. Yes, we have a business to run and yes we want that to be succesful as a business. At the end of the day though the team loves to build software that developers love, in some ways you can think of our business as a way to enable us to do what the team is passionate about: building a free platform that people can do cool stuff with.
I really wish I could comment more on what we're planning, but it's just too early. You are correct though we decided to do another release between CS 2.1 and 3.0 (CS 2.2) to focus on revamping the skins/theme system.
Just to clarify a little of what Rob mentioned...
1. We are working on a new skinning engine. The first goal of this engine is to make it *very* easy to create new themes. The target market for this is anyone with a little bit of CSS/markup skills (bonus points if you are comfortable with runat="Server". Besides bugs, this is the only shipping criteria we have for CS 2.2. The dev cycle should be fairly quick.
2. Once the engine in #1 is written, we are going to develop a Theme which is can be managed 100% via the control panel (colors, font's, logo, layout, and hopefully much more). This will be a big part of CS 3.0 and it should be usable by anyone with a decent browser. It's target date is in the "winter".
I have been working on a post or two about how and what we plan on building, but as Rob mentioned, we want to make sure we are happy with the results before we have people planning around them. We are very serious about improving the theming experience in CS. Our goal it to introduce this once, so if what we work on during the summer isn't cutting it, we may punt it until we get it right.
Thanks,Scott
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Just to throw my two cents in, I think the real thing that is lacking is documentation. Once I spent a few days going through each file, the big picture suddenly fell into place. I now know where to and what to edit what to get things looking the way I want (for the most part). Honestly, a breakdown of what files integrate with what by default would be a great help. Though now that I've delved into it, such a chart would be incredibly large and intricate
The more I go through the layout code, the more I welcome my newfound freedom to modify it as I see fit.
dcsmrgun: Just to throw my two cents in, I think the real thing that is lacking is documentation.
Just to throw my two cents in, I think the real thing that is lacking is documentation.
Yes, and the ugly truth here is that we conciously made the decision to not document the current skinning system -- because we knew it wasn't perfect. The learning curve is steep, but once it's learned it's a very, very powerful system. It was written specifically around how ASP.NET precompiles pages so unlike a lot of other skinning systems used by .NET applications there is no big runtime performance hit (where a runtime parser is walking through the output doing string replacements).
Once we have a the new theme/skin system done we will absolutely create documentation around how to create themes
Scott Watermasysk: 1. We are working on a new skinning engine. The first goal of this engine is to make it *very* easy to create new themes. The target market for this is anyone with a little bit of CSS/markup skills (bonus points if you are comfortable with runat="Server". Besides bugs, this is the only shipping criteria we have for CS 2.2. The dev cycle should be fairly quick.
This sounds great Scott. In this new design, is there the facility for someone (a Telligent developer or otherwise) to write a smart client that would make it *very* *very* easy to create new themes? Perhaps something like a service model to avoid requiring server folder access.
I think madkidd has an important point. My experience of the skinning in CS is that it is almost completely biased towards blogs. While blogs are important, blog only skins IMHO are only really good for community sites that represent multiple users who want to be different from each other. Sites that are for a single person or purpose only look unprofessional when the blog is different to everything else.
I haven't been very successful at finding whole site skins for CS2.0, then there is also the default issue that madkidd mentioned.
I'm very keen to see what you guys come up with.
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