MOD Description: This MOD replaces the old template base to XHTML 1.0 Strict and UTF-8 compliant base. It also provides tools for modern JavaScript with prototype.js.
MOD Version: Early development / planning phase.
MOD Download: n/a
Last Stable version: n/a
Demo Board: http://kontu.selfip.info/phpBB2/
Demo Username: n/a
Demo Password: n/a
The base idea is modernize the code base of phpBB2 by dumping out the outdated XHTML Transitional code as well as improve i18n by forcing UTF-8. Additionally prototype.js is also provided out-of-the-box thus enabling easy JavaScript development.
Goals
- Much more options for styling via CSS by removing the tag soup and by restructuring the HTML.
- Individual IDs to elements where possible to improve CSS and JavaScript usage.
- Perfect XML compliancy: the forum could be served as application/xhtml+xml without a trouble.
- Retain compatibility with existing MODs where possible (unfortunatenaly templates will be broken entirely).
- Provide external JavaScript in an efficient way by packing and compressing (prototype.js is only 21332 bytes this way, without any handling it would be over 100 kB).
Personally I still find phpBB2 a nicer board to develop on thanks to the simplicity when compared to phpBB3 and other forum software, but I've grown a bit weary on the need of doing extra work for UTF-8 as well as being very limited in CSS styling. subSilver isn't a JavaScript designer's dream either. With this MOD I've thought to eliminate this problem, hopefully there are others who are in the need of similar kind of solution.
Currently I'd be interested to hear on what kind of limitations or issues you've detected while developing for phpBB2, as with this MOD many things can be made much easier. The sample board linked above demonstrates some of the ideas that I have, but I may have missed something. Of course the sample board only has an index page at the moment as it is a slow process to rethink a good way to implement things. For example, I haven't yet decided whether I use tables or not in the viewtopic template.
One more thing: should some other MODs be included in a way or another, such as the Multi BBcode? As it is, with prototype.js a lot of the JS can be rewritten thus making JavaScript containing MODs such as Multi BBcode more incompatible and bothersome to install. The main package could contain extensions to some of the most used MODs.