New responsive forum layout available

[Zorak]

We are in the process of redesigning the powerchurch.com web site to be more responsive and small screen friendly. A responsive layout should work and look OK at any screen resolution you are viewing on.

As part of this, we have installed a new style template here on the forum. Eventually, it will be made the default and applied to everyone, but I wanted to give you regular users a chance to check it out and report any problems that you have with it.

To change the template, go to User Control Panel linked near the top left. Then click on the Board Preferences tab. There you will find a setting called My Board Style. The current site default is Prosilver Special Edition. The new style is Coralis - Light Blue.

Let me know here if there are any particular pages that don't look right, or if things don't fold up properly on small screens.

Thanks!

[NeilZ]

My problem is that there is a lot of 'white space' on the page viewing on my PC.

As far as the formatting controls, nothing I can't get used to, but the extra 'white space' seems .... um ... wasteful !!

[Zorak]

Thanks for the feedback. I have spent the last half hour or so tightening up all the margins and padding that I can find in the stylesheets to be a little more efficient on the screen real estate. Hopefully that will help some.

[jwdick]

Looks much better. Even on my smartphone.

[Zorak]

Great. Thanks!

[tborgal]

It works great here. I especially like the fact that it conforms to the window size no matter how narrow I make it. It does seem that the flat icon trend is catching on, which I am not a big fan of.

[Zorak]

Thanks, Tom. This is a third party theme that we purchased and customized.

I am also not personally a fan of the flat button style.

[CranfordUMC]

I do not normally go into the online forum unless I want to enter or respond to a posting. What I normally do is look at the "Powerchurch Today" Community tab to read postings. Last week I notice that the newest post is from 03/13/14. So I went online and noticed that the format there is kind of hard to read in IE Version 10 because it is very narrow. I tried going in using Chrome (which is what I am now using for this post) and it looks a lot better and more readable. Is there something about IE 10 that is causing the format to be so narrow?
Why aren't the latest posts showing up on my Community tab? I am using PC Version 11.1.

[Zorak]

Hi Steve, Thanks for the feedback. I'm not sure what would be the issue with IE10. I have IE11 here and it looks the same as it does in Firefox and Chrome. When you say it was too narrow, how did it fit in the window you were viewing it in? The purpose of the new theme is to rearrange and resize based on different size screens.

Internet Explorer has a very bad reputation for not rendering web pages the way that all other browsers do, not conforming for standards. It may be that older versions of IE have a problem with the new HTML5 and CSS3 stuff that responsive web layouts use.

[CranfordUMC]

Zorak,
When I look at the board index it does get wider as I increase the width of the window to full screen. But as soon as I select General questions and discussions what I see is only 4" wide with a lot of white space on each side. The text is wrapped and hard to read. This does not occur with Chrome which is what I am using now to reply with. I don't use it that much so using Chrome instead of IE is no big deal. I hesitate upgrading to IE 11. When I Logon to Gmail it says I have IE compatibility view enabled, could this be the cause?

Also, why aren't the latest post available when I select the Power Church Today Community post???? The newest post is from 03/13/14. I look at these daily when using PC to see what is going on and to learn new things.

[Zorak]

IE 11 is better than 10 at these types of things (like browsing the internet). I just manually enabled compatibility view in IE11 and it broke the page layout. You should be able to click the broken page icon up in the address bar to toggle off compatibility view.

Regarding the new forum posts feed, there was apparently a file permissions issue. We've gotten that sorted out and it should be updating in properly now.

[CranfordUMC]

Yup, it was the compatibility view that was causing my problem. I turned it off and all is as it should be.

The Power Church Today Community Tab is now showing current posts.

Thanks for the help, I owe you a cup of coffee.

[Zorak]

Glad to hear that fixed it!

[tborgal]

I am noticing that the View New Posts window is not clearing posts that I have already read. Is this a problem or should it be working this way.

[Zorak]

I have not noticed that. I only use the "View unread posts" link. Now, it will show the same posts if I use the Back button in the browser after looking at a post, but any time that View unread posts page is refreshed, everything I have actually read is gone.

There hasn't been any change to the system itself, just the stylesheets and page templates. The core functionality of the forum is the same.