A couple suggestions..

[Gabriel Petrelli]

For IPB3 I noticed there is an option in the ACP to disable custom profile fields from showing in topic view, but it has no effect on the continuous topic view of private messages and conversations.

Also it would be nice if IPS would consider adding BBCode/HTML formatting and a limit cutoff to PM notification popups for IPB3.

It would also be nice to allow anyone to be able to set a custom title and not require posts, currently if I set the posts to zero it disables custom titles completely.

A more compact, less bloated default IPB3 theme and/or standard for all themes. As much as it's praised by the folks here at IPS my members and staff absolutely dislike it with a passion, I've received numerous complaints from members about the bulky, bloated look and feel of IPB3 compared to IPB2 and even Vbulletin. Some of my staff pointed out slowness, lag, increased page load times of IPB3 compared to IPB2 and I've noticed the same. Css and templates aren't optimized as pointed out by one of my staff, images suffer the same issue as some themes have large images that are ideal. Due to these issues I am forced to do the optimizations and edits myself or seek out someone willing to help, when it should be standard in IPB3. Whatever theme authors do is up to them, my suggestions only apply for the default IPB3 theme which is not only unattractive to me in it's current state, but my members and staff as well.

If I have any more suggestions, I'll post them as they present themselves.

I hope my suggestions are helpful and will aid IPS to improve the software for future releases of IPB. :)

[Josh]

Also it would be nice if IPS would consider adding BBCode/HTML formatting and a limit cutoff to PM notification popups for IPB3.

This introduces a lot of complications, since the pm previews are truncated to fit in the preview box. If the cutoff to where happen in the middle of a formatting tag, it could potentially break the rest of the page, so we probably won't format those notifications any time soon.

It would also be nice to allow anyone to be able to set a custom title and not require posts, currently if I set the posts to zero it disables custom titles completely.

We'll keep that in mind for a later release, however, I'd recommend just setting it to 1, if you want everyone to have access.

A more compact, less bloated default IPB3 theme and/or standard for all themes. As much as it's praised by the folks here at IPS my members and staff absolutely dislike it with a passion, I've received numerous complaints from members about the bulky, bloated look and feel of IPB3 compared to IPB2 and even Vbulletin. Some of my staff pointed out slowness, lag, increased page load times of IPB3 compared to IPB2 and I've noticed the same. Css and templates aren't optimized as pointed out by one of my staff, images suffer the same issue as some themes have large images that are ideal. Due to these issues I am forced to do the optimizations and edits myself or seek out someone willing to help, when it should be standard in IPB3. Whatever theme authors do is up to them, my suggestions only apply for the default IPB3 theme which is not only unattractive to me in it's current state, but my members and staff as well.

For CSS, make sure that you have minify enabled, that will drastically cut down CSS size.

[Gabriel Petrelli]

Yes, minify css/javascript is enabled and page loading is still slow and lags. With IPB2 page load times were significantly less and there wasn't as much lag, I've been trying to tweak my IPB3 install since there is nothing I can do server side as I am on shared hosting. ;)

[bfarber]

A more compact, less bloated default IPB3 theme and/or standard for all themes. As much as it's praised by the folks here at IPS my members and staff absolutely dislike it with a passion, I've received numerous complaints from members about the bulky, bloated look and feel of IPB3 compared to IPB2 and even Vbulletin. Some of my staff pointed out slowness, lag, increased page load times of IPB3 compared to IPB2 and I've noticed the same. Css and templates aren't optimized as pointed out by one of my staff, images suffer the same issue as some themes have large images that are ideal. Due to these issues I am forced to do the optimizations and edits myself or seek out someone willing to help, when it should be standard in IPB3. Whatever theme authors do is up to them, my suggestions only apply for the default IPB3 theme which is not only unattractive to me in it's current state, but my members and staff as well.

What, specifically, is not optimized about the current skin might I ask? Your staff and yourself have apparently found something specific ("Css and templates aren't optimized as pointed out by one of my staff") so that information would be useful if you would like to see such changes made to the base software.

As far as I'm aware, the templates and CSS are very very much optimized. HTML is semantic and limited to actually structural tags that identify the content, as it should be, and CSS is abstracted and cacheable. CSS is larger than IPB 2, but that's necessary when creating semantic skins.

I'd be interested in exactly what you are referring to when you say "optimize the templates and CSS".

[Gabriel Petrelli]

I'd be interested in exactly what you are referring to when you say "optimize the templates and CSS".

I was just reporting what my staff informed me of, there are also some highly intelligent professional coders for the niche my community covers. I never bothered asking for specifics, but I will do so and post an update once I receive clarification. :thumbsup:

Another thing would be to look at how compact and simplistic the default Neowin skin is for IPB3, this should have been the way it should have been done from the beginning for IPB3.

Other than the few quirks I mentioned, IPB3 is an otherwise stable and solid product. :)

[bfarber]

I was just reporting what my staff informed me of, there are also some highly intelligent professional coders for the niche my community covers. I never bothered asking for specifics, but I will do so and post an update once I receive clarification. :thumbsup:

Great. Without specifics, there's little we could do, but if they have specific suggestions, we're all ears.

Another thing would be to look at how compact and simplistic the default Neowin skin is for IPB3, this should have been the way it should have been done from the beginning for IPB3.

Please understand that this is an opinion. The majority of our customers have expressed an opinion that the default skin is just fine. Some of our customers would like it to look different (such as yourself, apparently) however it's a case of "you can't please everyone". We attempted to keep the HTML structure generic so that very few HTML templates actually *need* to be changed to change the overall look and feel of the board. You can make it "compact" if you want with a few CSS changes without having to edit HTML templates, but no matter how it looks out of the box, not everyone will be happy.

I'm not discounting your opinion either (it's an opinion, there's no right or wrong), just pointing out that it *is* an opinion. :)

And for that reason, I'm soooooo glad Rikki does the skinning and not me. :D

[Gabriel Petrelli]

Well anyways I'm going to be moving everything to a VPS, a royal pain on my current satellite internet connection. Along with this I will be adding server side optimizations, editing templates and css to compact the themes a bit. It isn't really a big deal, although there is a bit of work on my end to tackle this.


I think the staff who mentioned the unoptimized CSS claimed the themes loaded weirdly, were slow, and lagged. I have to say I noticed a substantial difference compared to my IPB 2.3.6 install before I upgraded to IPB 3.0.x. The staff member who said this is a root admin on my forum and also my secondary contact here at IPS. I'll ask him for clarification or see if he can provide some feedback here. :)

[bfarber]

Clarification would indeed be useful. When you use a CSS-based theme (as opposed to embedding styling information into the HTML) then the CSS becomes bigger. There's really no way around that. There is a benefit, however, that CSS files can cache in your browsers, where-as dynamically generated pages usually do not, so ultimately things should download FASTER because less has to download on subsequent requests.

[Gabriel Petrelli]

I asked the staff member who mentioned it, he mentioned it was a problem specific to the White Christmas theme which is unrelated to the IPB Default theme, my misunderstanding so I apologize. :)

Anyway I am going to be working on trimming down the size of images and making the themes more compact, I'd be willing to offer advice to anyone else looking to do the same.