Its cool but not as shocking as the forum module was =)

Very Nice, thank you!

A minor item that is probably allready fixed or is on a todo list somehwere.

Forum Triggering Word
When this word is encountered your URL it will display your forum. The word you choose can not be the name of an existing template group

That line needs to be fixed to display proper engrish.

Any chance we will be able to create a multiple instances of the forum for different communities or are we limited to only one instance per install of EE?

Looks good.

There seems to be a bug on one page though ? Where should I report it ? In Firefox, when I click on “smileys” to view the smileys & click on one to add it, it’s added to the field. However, the list of smileys disapear and when I click on “smileys” again, the list won’t show up. I need to click on another link (e.g. glossary) and click again on smileys to make the list visible ...

Thanks for letting us see this. It looks good.

BTW I have category lists with more than 500 categories. If you also introduced the expandable/collpsable functionality, as an option, into the category tree, that would be a nice way to improve working with big lists of categories.

Very nice, kudos to all.

If I may add a couple of observations.

The Gallery has it’s templates in the templates section but the Forum’s templates are in the modules section. Is this because the Forum is a seperate app and the Gallery is a bundled app? Viewing the templates for the Forum, it doesn’t seem to remember what section you had opened when you page back.

I don’t know if this has been asked before, probably has, the only thing missing in the templates section is some kind of highlighting, would make it easier for new users to grasp templating. I know we can copy the template and paste into a desktop editor with highlighting and then paste it back but it would be a cool feature to have in control panel.

I’m using Firefox 1.0.4, KDE 3.3.2 running on Debian 3.1 (Sarge). No major rendering issues to report of.

hcgtv - 25 June 2005 11:53 AM

The Gallery has it’s templates in the templates section but the Forum’s templates are in the modules section. Is this because the Forum is a seperate app and the Gallery is a bundled app?

Well they are both bundled apps as they run off the EE code base.  I do see what you are asking and my question is very similar.  It seems the forum is handled quite differently from the photo gallery module.  From what I can see a big difference is the photo gallery can have as many instances as you like, and each gallery can have a unique look.  The forum module appears to only support one instance per EE install.

Michel (NL) - 25 June 2005 04:35 AM

However will there be an option to keep the current publish form with all the options on one page? I’m a great fan of everything on one page as that prevent me to click on several tabs..
But the look ‘n feel is really nice

This was my first reaction too (more clicks to publish an entry), but I’m probably oversensitive as I’m working on site that will likely require a few hundred entries into a product catalog.  The fieldset is custom, but all the commenting/trackback/pinging stuff is turned off so the current single-page entry form is a good fit.  Guess I’ll have to look into what it will take to import the entries at the database level…

Otherwise I like it…very nice job of making the pmachine.com experience consistent with the software experience.

By the way guys, sorry for spreading my question between two different forums.  Lisa posted a reply which is very relevant for all discussion in this thread.

http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/24023/

There is only so much that you can see by clicking around the control panel.  Wait for the docs. =)

A very nice, clean new look.

Here are some thoughts and suggestions on the control panel: I now find navigation back and forth to be slightly more difficult and extra mouse clicks are required especially in the Admin tab of the Control Panel. Although I like the simplified look of this tab, it is easy to get lost when moving back and forth between pages since the Show/Hide state of each tab is not retained.

For instance, if I am drilling down from the Admin tab to Weblog Management selection and then navigate backwards to the Admin tab again, the state of each heading goes back to collapsed.

Within the Control Panel panes and pages, the state of the collapsible headings really need to have the ‘save state’ functionality so slickly employed within the the Template section.

I hope the pMachine team will consider this and a few other suggestions:

1) Would it be possible to utilize something akin to accesskeys to open/close each group heading within a pane using only the keyboard?
Perhaps Show/Hide All could have accesskeys assigned?

2) I notice that the tabs may be customized which is a great idea…
When a user creates a new tab, can the state of each heading be saved with it?
ie Save a new Admin tab with the Utilitiesand System Preferences already expanded

3) Could there be a default setting to have all Control Panel headings default to Show instead of Hide?

Very slick.  I’m uber excited.

Thanks for the peek.  Totally awsome and so professional looking.

But then again…  This is always what I get and expect from PMachine.  You guys have raised the bar again.

Excellent job.

The reason the forum templates are managed within the module itself (actually as files on the server), rather than in the main template area, like the gallery is:

1.  The gallery consists of only a few pages, just like a typical blog.  The forum has well over 100 templates and template fragments that have very precise relationships with each other.  Due to the completely dynamic nature of forums, a fair amount of template parsing and assembly is required in order to display any given page.  This assembly would be much more processor intensive if we managed the templates using our main template engine vs. the specialized, light-weight one we designed specifically for the forums.  The template engine in EE, due to the incredible flexibility it has, requires a fair amount of horsepower to run.  This is fine if you’re showing one template or one with a couple embedded templates, but when you’re talking about rendering dozens of templates to create a single page, as in the case of a forum, it’s simply not efficient, particularly since you don’t have the luxury of caching forums.  Our main template engine does tons of things that are simply unnecessary in a controlled environment like a forum, so why expend the additional server resources?  One of our big goals for the forum was scalability.  It has to handle the load induced by thousands of simultaneous users.  Had we used our main processing engine we would have more limited scalability.

2.  The forum can be themed on the fly.  Each member of your community can choose which theme to view the forum in (once more themese are developed).  This type of theming would be impossible (or I should say, very impractical) if they were stored similar to your general site templates.  Imagine if you had 5 different themes?  You’d have to install and manage 500 templates in your control panel.  That’s just not practical.  It would also make installing new themes more difficult.  Currently to install a forum theme you just drop the theme files into a folder on your server.

Michel (NL) - 25 June 2005 04:35 AM

However will there be an option to keep the current publish form with all the options on one page? I’m a great fan of everything on one page as that prevent me to click on several tabs..
But the look ‘n feel is really nice

I concur… I think that it would be really easy to forget to do something. And already with everyting on one page my group blog authors rarely choose a category other than the default.

Other than that, I like the new control panel - it looks very clean and professional.