MAXdev

Showcase of Sites - A site about one of the biggest cities no one has heard of.
NateM - Feb 20, 2006 - 08:25 AM
Post subject: A site about one of the biggest cities no one has heard of.
I've come on here countless times before looking for help with this site, so some of you are probably already familiar with it. Here it is:

http://www.TianjinExpats.net

It is a website for foreigners living in the city of Tianjin, the 3rd largest city in China after Beijing and Shanghai. Features all the usuals, classifieds, forums, photos, and a guide to the city. Up until today, however, I've just been using one of the default themes for the site, both because my knowledge about how to do autothemes is pretty limited and because I'm lazy.

About a week ago I got sick of what I was looking at and decided to try something new. As I'm still not skilled enough to create my own theme from scratch, I downloaded a free one from www.autothemes.com and I've modified it pretty heavily. Here is the original theme I took:

link

Part of the reason I modified it was that most of it didn't work very well. It appears that this is actually a theme that has been ported from post-nuke, and it was done so somewhat haphazardly. Links to read full stories, searches, and basic theme function just plain old weren't working.

What I have right now, however, is a pretty nice step up from what I was using before. However, I do have a few nagging little issues I was hoping to quash, and was wondering if anyone here had any suggestions:

1. I wanted to place a block of recent posts in the forum area, much like this here:
http://maxdev.com/Cnl_Forums.phtml

What I have, though, ends up turning out like this:
Edit: I've removed the link and instead attached a picture below, as I'd rather disable the block until I can fix it. See "probem2.gif" to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

I don't understand why it's formatting the way it is. Both my Centerblock and center2 block use the same centerblock.html to display information. However, if I place the multiblock in the center2 block the formatting messes up and it takes up excessive amounts of space.

2. When adding photos or editing them using photoshare, the option to save or add images now appears way over to the left. I don't remember it doing that before, and would prefer if it was grouped with everything else like it used to be. See the screenshot below for an idea of what I'm talking about. I'll probably switch over to gallery once that gets released to the public or I get off my but and become a booster, but for now photoshare is what I'm using. So if anyone has any tips on what I can do to fix this, it would be appreciated.

3. On the right hand side of the banner there's just this huge, blank area that I don't really know what to do with. Any ideas? I suppose I could always sign up for google ads, but I'd like to keep the site as commercial-free as possible.

Any other suggestions or comments people have, I'm more than willing to listen to them. Thanks for taking the time to read all the way down to the bottom of this here.

D'oh. Posted this in the wrong forum first time. Here we go again.
deon - Mar 16, 2006 - 10:06 PM
Post subject:
Hi NateM,

I think you have done very well with your site. I think it's cool, clean and easy to navigate. Good one! Laughing
skyline5k - Apr 29, 2006 - 07:56 PM
Post subject:
Not sure if you fixed your multiblock already but have a look at http://www.jinanlive.com. What I did was some serious editing of lines 310 or so of the multiblock code basically by telling it NOT to put stuff down on the next line. Also, I've also recently found out that the centerblock part of multiblock can ONLY be used if the autoblock is centerblock. Mine didn't work because mine's technically called "Forum-blocks". Move it to center-block & see what it does. Not center2-blocks.
skyline5k - Apr 29, 2006 - 08:26 PM
Post subject:
Code:
         $blockinfo['content'] .= "<a href=\"" . $link_url . "viewtopic&amp;p=$post_id#" . $post_id . "\" title=\"" . _GOTO_POST . "\"><img style=\"border:0px\" src=\"modules/$ModName/images/" . $replyicon . ".gif\" alt=\"" . _GOTO_POST . "\"/></a>&nbsp;&nbsp;";
               $blockinfo['content'] .= "<a href=\"" . $link_url . "viewtopic&amp;t=" . $topic_id . "\" title=\"" . $cat_title . '/' . $forum_name . '/' . $topic_subject . "\">" . $topic_subject . "</a>&nbsp;<strong>" . _TOPIC_REPLIES . "</strong>&nbsp;(" . $post_replies . ")&nbsp;<strong>" . _TOPIC_VIEWS . "</strong>&nbsp;(" . $post_views . ")</span><br />";
               $blockinfo['content'] .= "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<span style=\"color: #666666;\"><i>" . _POST_BY . "&nbsp;<a href=\"" . $profile_url . "\">" . $username_short . "</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<a href=\"" . $link_url . "viewforum&amp;f=$forum_id\">$forum_name&nbsp;</a>";
               
               if ($vars['display_date'])
               {
                  $blockinfo['content'] .= "<strong>" . _POST_ON . "</strong> " . $post_date;
               }
               
               if ($vars['display_date'])
               {
                  $blockinfo['content'] .= "<strong>" . _POST_AT . "</strong> " . $post_time;


This should start at line 310 on your multiblock.php page. I don't have the original multiblock anymore, so I can't really give a comparison.
NateM - Apr 30, 2006 - 02:51 AM
Post subject:
What I actually ended up doing was moving all of my "Center-Block" content to an the "center-block2" area, and then put the forum header back in "center-block". Using autotheme, I set it so that the center block only displays when you're in the forum. That seemed to work pretty well.
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