Websitery (Also Known As The Art of Code-fu)

Hey, I wasn't sure where to put a topic about this, but my job has granted us in our tiny amount of downtime the right to study code at Codecademy! I just took a refresher course on HTML and CSS and it straightened out some of my self-taught knots.

I'm loving the new Favico! And the Xmas theme is charming! I'm actually thinking of moving XU's forums to their own dedicated host, but I wanted to find a place that'd let me have multiple layouts and not just the one. I tried Forumatic, which seemed awesome at first, but their customer service never got back to me even after I paid for a free trial, IP boards is exorbitantly expensive and bloated and got haxxed so, so badly, so I've kinda consigned myself to being chained to having to update my own host by hand forever. T^T

I am also sad that Forumotion does not offer multiple skins (unless you give in and allow back-up themes to be optional, but with non-customizeable images....) and the only way I can have a theme where I can edit all of the images myself is to have a back up forum and use coding for it--but my only back up forum is for theme creation and changes all of the time, so....yeah.

I know that MANY FM users have asked for there to be some theme changer options to be added, but as of yet, those requests have been ignored, like most requests. I do not honestly believe it will be an update that is ever established.

I never tried Codeacademy, how is it ? I already know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but a refresher is always nice. I got lost in reading some of the JS articles on MDN the one day and learned some things I never knew before.

The multi-theme thing is something that FM lacks. I did write a script for it, however, it only loads the stylesheet of the theme, not images. I could probably rework that with some additional functions, but that might be a bit annoying having to input each image into the script. I know that you can use a query to change the theme, aside from the hitskin banner and some other broken things. https://www.gatewaytoroleplay.com/?theme_id=206081

Maybe I should rethink it. xD

I've not spent enough time with forum software, but for the moment I decided to stick with phpBB3.1. I have some things to learn, like PHP and I think it'll be good for practicing, for now.

As an expert, having to go through the junior exercises on Codecademy were a little painful, but since I'm so out of practice, I hunkered down like a new student would a brand new kung-fu master and came away with a little more than I thought I would. Their HTML/CSS course isn't all that in-depth, though.

Here's the link for it!
http://www.codecademy.com/learn

Oh man, that's actually a pretty cool little script! :D I've been hankering to learn how to make a CSS switcher for my personal website, so that users can choose from pre-programmed sets of colors to their liking for the duration of their stay. :> This reminds me a little bit of that.

Today in internet disasters, my attempt to upgrade XU to PHPBB 3.1 was a complete failure. Not only did my database tables freak out, but almost every attempt I made to fix it broke it worse. I finally got it back on its feet by uploading all the old files, but it's a bit of a zombified mess at the moment. In my despair, I've signed up with Forumotion despite the layout constrictions, so I'm hoping an import can happen seamlessly and the only thing we'll have to worry about is the style. Yall had an Invision option, and I've kinda missed Invision since Godsibb went byebye.

I'll have to check it out sometime, thanks. I usually read up on Mozilla Developer Network or W3schools.

Yeah, it's not bad if you just want to change stylesheets. The only downside is that it cannot change navigation images, banners, and other images that aren't included in the stylesheet. You can check it out here. I'll have to one day see if there's a better way, y'know to keep the images of that theme.

I'm a complete amateur when it comes to databases and ftp stuff ( started like a week ago ). When I first setup phpbb3.1 I moved something into the wrong directory after installing and then broke the entire thing, so I had to delete it and reinstall. After that I didn't touch anything except the modified templates I transferred. xD

Forumotion is not bad, I've not tried the import feature, yet. Only downside is there's no ability to export your forum's database. Other than that, their Administration panel and ability to easily change forum versions / themes is nice.

I'm glad I stuck with it! It really is great to be with Forumotion. I will need to look into the CSS switching stuff a little closer. I'm about to learn Bootstrap pretty soon so I'm excited!

I haven't looked into bootstrap, mostly because I don't have a mobile device to test what I'm doing. Well, responsive design mode works nice when I need to test media queries, but it's not a REAL mobile device. Hmm.. I do have a PSP with THE WORST browser I've ever held. lol

Aside from that, I am taking a refresher of JavaScript on MDN. I know I missed a lot the first time I read about it on another website. A few days ago I realized I could use break to break out of a loop. Many times I could've used that when I was doing comparisons in a loop.. DOH

I was also playing around with FontAwesome since the project I'm working on makes use of it for icons. It's pretty simple to install on the forums too since we have access to templates on all versions. ..they have a ton of icons, but they're missing a clover ! >_<