Design Showcase: Idle Chatter - A General Discussion Community

[Gemma]

A new thread for my wee general discussion website - Idle Chatter - which I've spent some time customizing over the past few years. The site is based on the Nova theme by Pixel Exit with a few customizations here and there.

A large part of the site runs off excellent addons by @Bob - Showcase, Articles, Blogs, Classifieds, Link Directory and the guys on the site also have Sportsbook and Pickem for their sporting interests.

And a number of addons by @Ozzy47 and the team at OzzModz including the various Thread Starter addons, private threads, competition threads, spaminator addons and numerous others that make life my admin life a little easier.

And some excellent addons from @BassMan, again making my life easier and enhancing the site.

I've customized most of the site to my own liking (and that of my members, hopefully)

The forum index...



Thread lists look different depending what you are browsing, traditional threads have been simplified a little



And the thread starter lists (movies, tv shows, video games and music albums) have all been converted to grid layouts



The majority of Bob's addons are all customized to look similar too, Showcase has been turned into a recipe book



And Articles, Blogs, Link Directory and Classifieds all have similar tiled layouts with little customizations



We also have social groups and media galleries



And areas of the site like profiles and posts have also had a makeover



We currently have 104 members, 1839 threads and 22,856 messages, 130 recipes and 102 articles

Idle Chatter

An online community with a wide range of discussions, social groups, recipes and much more. Create and join discussions which interest you!

idlechatter.co.uk

The site is invite-only but thanks for having a look

 

[Aerodynamic]

Even though I'm not an active poster, I love reading some posts now and then. You've got a brilliant forum, very nicely customized!

 

[Gemma]

Even though I'm not an active poster, I love reading some posts now and then. You've got a brilliant forum, very nicely customized!

Thank you. I know the design isn't to everyone's taste but it works for us and being someone with no real computer knowledge who just runs a site as a hobby and for fun it allows me to learn new skills through trial and error.

As for posts and content, I'm happy with the level of activity. We try not to post many "forum games" type posts and I REALLY don't like the idea of forum promotion sites and requesting people to come post on your site (not possible now anyway since we are an invite-only site). I find nothing more offputting than seeing the same people registered on a host of sites posting the same content again and again - that is maybe just me but I don't see that as the right way to run a site - you are cheating your members and yourself as well as sacrificing any uniqueness /individuality but everyone has different opinions and ideas on how to run a site (maybe a discussion for a separate thread ). Anyway, as I said, I'm happy with the activity, we post what interests us and discuss it accordingly just as we would if we were meeting up in person.

And back to showcasing, after some tidying up, some screens from how it looks on mobile devices - I must admit this is a design area I struggle with the most

 

[Melvin Garcia]

Nice proyect but

Your IP address has been banned.

 

[JoyFreak]

Looks really good Gemma! Keep it up

 

[Gemma]

Looks really good Gemma! Keep it up

Thank you @JoyFreak.

Just been playing around with your Nodes Extended addon tonight, still got some tinkering to do but happy with the results so far :

 

[Gemma]

Finished off my member profiles revamp tonight. Finally got the idea that was floating about in my head is complete and active on both desktop and mobile devices.

 

[JoyFreak]

Finished off my member profiles revamp tonight. Finally got the idea that was floating about in my head is complete and active on both desktop and mobile devices.

The work you’ve done makes us believe that anything can be achieved with this software. Your work is fantastic Gemma! 😍

 

[Lee]

Outstanding as always Gemma.

What are you using for invite only registrations?

 

[Gemma]

The work you’ve done makes us believe that anything can be achieved with this software. Your work is fantastic Gemma! 😍

Thank you! Some of my ideas take me a while but I get there in the end. I should probably take some computer/coding lessons or read documentation 😂

Outstanding as always Gemma.

What are you using for invite only registrations?

Thank you Lee, I moved from Siropu's Referral System to his Referral Contests

 

[Lee]

Thank you! Some of my ideas take me a while but I get there in the end. I should probably take some computer/coding lessons or read documentation 😂


Thank you Lee, I moved from Siropu's Referral System to his Referral Contests

Ahh, thank you. Not quite what I am looking for - I want something where registration links are generated from within the ACP and sent by admin.

I really like the profile customisations. I did something similar, but way more half arsed with The Life Spot - your implementation is way more polished and professional. Great job!

 

[Gemma]

Ahh, thank you. Not quite what I am looking for - I want something where registration links are generated from within the ACP and sent by admin.

Not sure how you are intending to use the links but you can create invitations in the ACP for individuals or user groups along with expiry dates and which user group the invited person would be placed in on registration

Once the links are generated they are available within the ACP or in the user's invitation page in the front end

 

[Lee]

Not sure how you are intending to use the links but you can create invitations in the ACP for individuals or user groups along with expiry dates and which user group the invited person would be placed in on registration

Once the links are generated they are available within the ACP or in the user's invitation page in the front end

Thank you @Gemma, I might look in to that.

Currently playing around with @XenSoluce - Invite system on a dev install to see if it can do what I want.

Anyway, I will stop cluttering your thread up now!

 

[Gemma]

Played about with the new versions of Tv Thread Starter and Movie Thread Starter by @Ozzy47 and made some layout changes to the templates for both, as well as updated the Game Thread Starter and Music Thread Starter thread view templates so they all match...

And, I've finally managed to make prefixes clickable and display only tooltips (site-wide)...I've only been banging my heading against a brick wall trying to achieve this since before man invented the wheel (tiny exaggeration)



I'm sure someone will be a smartass and tell me how it is as easy as flicking a switch in setting

 

[Gemma]

So, I decided to play around with a new portal page today. I uninstalled (TH) Feature Threads and Content and opted for Widget Homepage by @BassMan as the base for my new layout. Not finished it yet but it is coming together...the idea was just to have a "wall" of images but it didn't look right, so I moved some of the image widgets (movies/tv latest posts) to the sidebar and made some additional tabbed widgets, and here's where we are...

idle CHATTER - Community Wall

A little taste of what our community has to offer.....

idlechatter.co.uk

And, made a wee minor change to the Pickem addon (just to show it some love)

 

[Gemma]

Some final work on our layout for mobile devices today and I think our 2023 refresh is complete. I think I'm happy with this layout and probably won't make any significant changes until 2024 when we hopefully have a new version and layout for XF 2.3

Also, thanks to @Russ for some easy to follow documentation on PixelExit which helped me with some tweaks.

I do have two new addons almost ready to go live so there may be some tweaks here and there...

 

[Gemma]

Oops, small update

Something requested by some of my members was the ability to remove/hide certain widgets. This has now been implemented on the forum index

 

[Gemma]

I do have two new addons almost ready to go live so there may be some tweaks here and there...

Content Badges is the first of the two new add-ons to go live. I'm quite sure my members will have fun with this one.

If we get a similar activity boost as we did with Competition Threads I'll be happy.

I'm also removed the Feeds addon by Audentio/Themehouse and will just use the built-in What's New pages to highlight new content - I'm sure XF2.3 will have some new way of engaging with new content.

 

[Gemma]

Some small changes to our community for March.

We've added some new add-ons/features including tournaments (this will be used for video game tournaments), been experimenting with a couple of the ChatGPT add-ons that are now available...feedback has been positive and I think this will be something we can definitely use, I've reactivated the core trophies feature and added the cumulative trophies add-on that was recently released. And I've added the PostAreas add-on by @Ozzy47 and given it a little makeover to suit my site.

With all the new add-ons and a couple of new forum nodes that I've set-up, I've added styling for thread types, prefixes etc to match my existing layout.



Also made some changes to our TV/Movies nodes, cleaned up the code and improved the layout a little...and given a little bit of TLC to our Blog section.

Still setting up my Item Management System but hopefully get that finished soon and get some testing done before going live.

 

[Gemma]

Small update, a work in progress, but it will be very helpful on my site going forward.

Been playing around with the latest version of [XTR]Member Stories (thanks for the update @XDinc ) and have given it a bit of a makeover

Going from this:


To this:


And also updating the user account layout...