SubSilver issue

Susann · Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 6:26 pm

I noticed in one of my forums a very small author table.I´m using DeepBlue and 2.0.22

How and in wich files could I fix such entries:

Author

blablah
Joined: Mar 21,
2007
Posts:
16
Location:
Germany

Normally it should like this:
Author

blablah

Joined: Mar 21, 2007
Posts: 16
Location: Germany

Gremmie · Posted: Fri Apr 27, 2007 8:31 pm

Ever since I went to RN2.10 I have noticed this too. In my case however, I have noticed that as soon as say 5 posts are added to a thread, they somehow resize themselves and look like normal (your 2nd example).

Susann · Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2007 3:18 am

I still have an older forums version and I don´t have such a problem there using DeepBlue.It seems really that with every new BB2Nuke version the table is smaller and smaller. Or is it only in RavenNuke I don´t know.

montego · Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2007 9:22 am

We really didn't touch BBtoNuke code all that much in RN2.10, though, so those are pretty close to base BBtoNuke. The themes were modified quite heavily for some.

Unfortunately, beyond this, I am not much help. I try my best to stay ignorant of anything phpBB. killing me

Susann · Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2007 10:35 am

I only need to know which files I should check to correct this. But maybe its easier to override all files in modules/Forums and themes/DeepBlue.
Its only a testsite. So thats not a great problem.

jaded · Theme Guru Joined: Nov 01, 2003 Posts: 1006

Susann,

I am sorry that I missed this post. The main page for this should be (if it is a tempate issue) viewtopic_body.tpl. This is the page that the post shows up on. I would play with that file and see what success you have. One way to test whether it is the file or the module is this. Take the viewtopic_body.tpl from the previous version of RN that you said you have and load it in place of the new. If it works, then simply find those entries in the file and then compare them with the new. Let us know if you need more help. Good luck.

Gremmie · Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 12:12 am

I have a hunch this is another artifact of RN 2.10 switching to XHTML. I notice it too, but after a few people have posted, the tables somehow straighten themselves out. I don't know if it is because they are posting a lot of text, wide links, or what. Haven't figured that out yet.

Susann · Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 5:23 am

Thanks Jaded. But I found out that this displays absolutely correct using IE and only with Firefox I have this issue. I uploaded all files but that did´t fix this problem maybe its a bad install somewhere.

jaded · Theme Guru Joined: Nov 01, 2003 Posts: 1006

In that case it is most likely an html issue in the template file. FF is far less accepting of errors.

fkelly · Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 6:18 pm

I don't recall that we changed the Forums part of the deepblue theme at all in rn2.10 development. Someone could look in the SVN to confirm that but I really don't think so.

There are a lot of other things in play here, including the upgrade to Forums 2.0.22 which took place during the development of RN 2.10 so isolating this might not be so simple. Maybe we can take a look at it for patch #2 for RN2.10 if someone cares to post it in Mantis.

Gremmie · Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 6:54 pm

Try changing the doctype back to HTML 4.01 transitional in header.php and see if it clears up. That will tell us a lot.

Gremmie · Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 7:01 pm

Gremmie wrote:

Try changing the doctype back to HTML 4.01 transitional in header.php and see if it clears up. That will tell us a lot.

I just did this on my site and the problem cleared up in Firefox. Must be some XHTML issue.

Gremmie · Posted: Sun Apr 29, 2007 7:14 pm

Okay, change back to XHMTL.

Now in viewtopic_body.tpl find this:

Code:

<tr>
<td width="150" align="left" valign="top" class="{postrow.ROW_CLASS}"><a name="{postrow.U_POST_ID}"></a>{postrow.POSTER_NAME} {postrow.POSTER_RANK} {postrow.RANK_IMAGE}{postrow.POSTER_AVATAR} {postrow.POSTER_JOINED} {postrow.POSTER_POSTS} {postrow.POSTER_FROM} </td>
<td class="{postrow.ROW_CLASS}" width="100%" height="28" valign="top"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

Look at the first two TD tags. The first one says width="150", and the second one (last line) says width="100%". I changed the first one to 20% and the second one to 80% and it looked a lot better. Maybe someone who knows a bit more can improve on this.

Susann · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 4:24 am

Thanks Gremmie. I only changed the td width and can confirm that solved this issue immediately using DeepBlue .

montego · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 6:33 am

Actually, I think the first width="100%" attribute should be removed altogether. Let the following table width of 100% expand it all the way out. I'd be interested to see if that works. I don't like the 20-80 only because that left column was intended to be fixed regardless of the browser window size.

Gremmie · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 4:01 pm

So what are the recommended changes all spelled out? Smile

Susann · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 5:07 pm

Good question.
Montego if its required I could add this with an example link into the bug tracker.
I copied from a working site the viewtopic_body.tpl and solved one error in the index_body.tpl but that doesn´t solve this problem.

montego · Posted: Mon Apr 30, 2007 6:00 pm

Susann, sounds like a good idea. We probably need to put it in "Future" though. We need to draw a line in the sand for .01.

fkelly · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 2:03 pm

I was going to post this in Mantis but I'll put it here also:

Quote:

I think that what we are seeing is misleading us. It is stated in the forum thread (if I recall correctly) that the width of the author's column seems to correct itself after a certain number of posts have been made. I was thinking about that and I think it's an artifact. What is really driving this is the width of the authors username. The column will be as wide as the widest authors name in the given topic. So what is happening is that, if there are enough posts, someone with a "wide" name eventually posts and the entire column "corrects" to that width.

I tested on fkelly.org with a single post for "dumperson@dumperson.net" in Deepblue and column for authors was plenty wide enough.

Gremmie, I think the code you were quoting was from subsilver but not from the viewtopic in the /deepblue/forums directory. I'm looking at that (the deepblue code) now and it's significantly different. I did a comparison also between what's in the fisubice/forums/viewtopic file and what's in the /deepblue one and they are significantly different.

Here is the code from deepblue:

Code:

<tr>
 <th class="thLeft" width="150" height="26" nowrap="nowrap">{L_AUTHOR}</th>
 <th class="thRight" nowrap="nowrap">{L_MESSAGE}</th>
</tr>

<tr>
 <td width="150" align="left" valign="top" class="{postrow.ROW_CLASS}"><a name="{postrow.U_POST_ID}"></a>{postrow.POSTER_NAME} {postrow.POSTER_RANK} {postrow.RANK_IMAGE}{postrow.POSTER_AVATAR} {postrow.POSTER_JOINED} {postrow.POSTER_POSTS} {postrow.POSTER_FROM} </td>
 <td class="{postrow.ROW_CLASS}" width="100%" height="28" valign="top"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
 <tr>
 <td width="100%"><a href="{postrow.U_MINI_POST}"><img src="{postrow.MINI_POST_IMG}" width="12" height="9" alt="{postrow.L_MINI_POST_ALT}" title="{postrow.L_MINI_POST_ALT}" border="0" /></a>{L_POSTED}: {postrow.POST_DATE}    {L_POST_SUBJECT}: {postrow.POST_SUBJECT}</td>
 <td valign="top" align="right" nowrap="nowrap">{postrow.QUOTE_IMG} {postrow.EDIT_IMG} {postrow.DELETE_IMG} {postrow.IP_IMG}</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td colspan="2"><hr /></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td colspan="2">{postrow.MESSAGE}{postrow.SIGNATURE}{postrow.EDITED_MESSAGE}</td>
 </tr>
 </table></td>
</tr>

I'm not sure where the source of the problem is. I'm not even completely sure this is the code that's being executed when you are in deepblue ... that's one of the problems with working with the PHPbb software in a state of ignorance. I'll fool with it and see.

fkelly · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 2:18 pm

I think I have it Smile

Comparing fisubice to deepblue, there is a spacer image in the td in fisubice that wasn't in deepblue. Modifying the code in deepblue seems to resolve the issue. Maybe if someone else wants to verify this? Here's the code as modified in /deepblue/forums/viewtopic_body.tpl:

Code:

<tr>
<td width="150" align="left" valign="top" class="{postrow.ROW_CLASS}"><a name="{postrow.U_POST_ID}"></a>{postrow.POSTER_NAME} {postrow.POSTER_RANK} {postrow.RANK_IMAGE}{postrow.POSTER_AVATAR} {postrow.POSTER_JOINED} {postrow.POSTER_POSTS} {postrow.POSTER_FROM} 
<img src="themes/deepblue/forums/images/spacer.gif" alt="" width="150" height="1" />

I think that without the spacer image the column can collapse to the item with the widest content.

Gremmie · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 5:26 pm

My theory would be that you have two table cells in the same row who have a problem with each other. One wants an absolute width of 150, and the other wants 100%. This seems to be a mistake, or at least a conflict. Under HTML 4.0, the 150 guy won out. Under XHTML under Firefox, the 100% guy is winning. The spacer.gif probably just hides the problem.

Or does 100% mean "100% of whatever is left after any absolutes are used"?

fkelly · Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 8:23 pm

I think it's "whatever is left" but I'm not sure. I always hated spacer gifs and the whole table-centric design but we are kind of stuck with making it work in the short run. As noted over in Mantis, the code I posted had "deepblue" in all small letters and that's wrong, it should be DeepBlue. It works on Windows but not Unix. But even with the correction weirdness is happening. The view source shows all small letters ... I don't know how that can be.

Time to reboot and get a night's sleep and we will look at it again tomorrow. I think that looking at the code between fisubice (which works) and DeepBlue, which doesn't is the way to go but I want to make as few changes as possible while still eliminating the problem. Someday later maybe we can come back and clean the whole thing up.

fkelly · Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 6:21 am

Amazing what a good night's sleep will do. With corrected spelling of "DeepBlue" on the server the width issue goes away. Previously I'm pretty sure it was loading the alt for the spacer.gif and that's just a '' so it wasn't causing the table column to be wide enough. I think there has to be something in there to cause the column to be 150px wide or else it will "collapse". Anyway the fix is SVN'd.

Gremmie · Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 9:53 am

How to fix in SubSilver? I don't really want to add a spacer gif...

fkelly · Posted: Thu May 10, 2007 12:05 pm

Ut-oh. I was just trying to fix DeepBlue for the Forums. The same problem occurs with Sub-Silver? Is this one of those cases where if you aren't using a theme that has its own Forum template you wind up running the Subsilver template and that has the same "collapsing" problem that DeepBlue did?

I don't like using spacer.gifs either. I was just trying to fix this with the minimum of code and effort and so I borrowed the approach that was used in fisubice. I don't know what an alternative solution would be -- I'm pretty sure we could find one but whether it's worth the effort is more of an open question to me. In light of all the other things that Nuke does inefficiently a 1k spacer.gif isn't going to slow things down appreciably.