New Theme for Principia Discordia Forum

[Cramulus]

Just so everybody's on the same page, nobody would be forced to use Rev Jeremiah's theme... you can choose a theme that looks like your work terminal, while I'm still using the Closet Homo in the Florida Keys theme.

But I'm with you there LMNO, I like simple, minimalist themes so that when somebody barges into my cubicle, I don't look like I'm fapping to lolcats. But at home, I like a zanier arrangement.



Jeremiah, I think you'll find this forum to be an interesting place, especially for someone that's so well acquainted with the "irreligious memeplex" (whatever that means - you know, Discorida & Subgenia). Ironically, the PD community takes a sort of skeptical, arms-length view of the PD - don't get me wrong, I love the book, but it's certainly not treated like a Holy Text around here. 

We're really interested in how we can apply all this Discordian Indoctrine to our lives and our creative projects without merely rehashing and repeating 50 year old in-jokes (a VERY COMMON trap for Discordians!). If you stick around, I'm sure you'll see some of that awesome energy.

[LMNO]

To be honest, alll I want is a fast-loading board that could pass at a glance as some application I use for work.  Too many bells and whistles would draw attention to the fact that I'm not actually working.

The board has been sluggish today, but otherwise isn't that what we have?

You apparently have seen through my clever plan...

[Faust]

To be honest, alll I want is a fast-loading board that could pass at a glance as some application I use for work.  Too many bells and whistles would draw attention to the fact that I'm not actually working.

The board has been sluggish today, but otherwise isn't that what we have?

You apparently have seen through my clever plan...

I'm adding goatse to the news bar as we speak

[Triple Zero]

well, if Jeremiah is going to beat me to updating the front page, that's good I'd really love to do it myself, but due to circumstances I simply can't make any promise as to when it could be finished, so if you all don't want to wait for that I can understand.

I'd personally prefer if it wouldn't use Flash, though. We have a PageRank 5 domain here that's indexed very well by the search engines, and it would be a shame to let that go for some flashy animation stuff. Also I'd prefer a more no-nonsense functional approach for the PD site, letting our discordianness speak from our actions and words, not zany bells and whistles.

Jeremiah, my (preliminary) new design for the front page is this: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/new_index.html (nice clean semantic HTML). My plan was to turn it into a WordPress Sandbox skin, incorporate that with the blog (http://www.principiadiscordia.com/blog) and use the WordPress software as the CMS for the rest of the pages, so our admins can easily keep the site up-to-date. If you follow.

[Reverend Jeremiah]

The board is going to be a bit sluggish sometimes when it handles this many guests and visitors. I can do a quick search for some mods that will boost your speed and load times, but if the owner is thinking of using the theme I am offering.. it would be best to install the theme first, then I can walk you through installing any mods by hand if they dont instantly upload.

Either that or I can take the theme.index.php file, throw some mods onto it by hand and then send it back so all you have to do is upload a single file (or just 2 or 3 instead of having to manual install yourself).

[Faust]

I'd personally prefer if it wouldn't use Flash, though. We have a PageRank 5 domain here that's indexed very well by the search engines, and it would be a shame to let that go for some flashy animation stuff. Also I'd prefer a more no-nonsense functional approach for the PD site, letting our discordianness speak from our actions and words, not zany bells and whistles.

it wont use flash, thats my side project and would never be the front page, it would be an alternative entrace as it were.

[Faust]

The board is going to be a bit sluggish sometimes when it handles this many guests and visitors. I can do a quick search for some mods that will boost your speed and load times, but if the owner is thinking of using the theme I am offering.. it would be best to install the theme first, then I can walk you through installing any mods by hand if they dont instantly upload.

Either that or I can take the theme.index.php file, throw some mods onto it by hand and then send it back so all you have to do is upload a single file (or just 2 or 3 instead of having to manual install yourself).

the response time speed is the sql, if you know some good mods for that forward me the links and I will have a look at installing them

[Reverend Jeremiah]

We have a PageRank 5 domain here that's indexed very well by the search engines, and it would be a shame to let that go for some flashy animation stuff. Also I'd prefer a more no-nonsense functional approach for the PD site, letting our discordianness speak from our actions and words, not zany bells and whistles.

Well, page rank doesnt exactly get lowered by the use of Flash on your site. I had 100% Flash on http://www.jesuschristarcade.com/ for 3 years and only just recently decided to move it over to MySQL and it grew to PageRank 4 during those Flash days and is still growing strong. It really helps to know how to add meta data into the Flash, and you can CRAM metadata into a Flash file without setting off the spider flags that look for repeated meta data while improving page rank(Damn, now you got me giving out my trade secrets!). Nevertheless, I do agree that Flash is not the cure. I would highly suggest going with what you got (simplicity) and then making the SMF theme reflect the color/image schemes of the main site so that everything looks fluid and simple. That was the MO I had when constructing this new theme to begin with.

Now I hear that the main site has been under construction for a new look. Pray tell where can I see this "version 2" site? I would have no problem setting a newer theme for this forum to reflect the color and image schemes of this "version 2" site 

I would also have no problem helping the final phases of construction for this new version as well.

[Reverend Jeremiah]

My apologies, I see the new site..looks good.

[Reverend Jeremiah]

Wordpress huh? Thats wonderful, it makes it easier for me to transfer CMS from wordpress to SMF in a breeze. Hmm, not much on the site nav to the right. Have you decided what you would like on the nav? Images would be MUCH more attractive than text, and having a picture of the actual book under that nav would be attractive as well.

Im also pretty good at making Favicons, so let me know something if you need anything..

I know, Im still a n00b here, but I have a well established net presence. If you wish to take some time before you let me on board then I understand completely. Until then feel free to ask me questions and I will try to help you as much as possible.

[Reverend Jeremiah]

Okay, lets trim a few things to pick up the speed of the forum. First thing you want to do (and all of these are optional) is get rid of those "MySQL" and "Powered by" buttons at the bottom of the forum. every page that is accessed draws 2370 bytes just from these useless buttons that NOBODY uses. Here is the mod that will remove those buttons:

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1330

You may also consider checking that the entire forum is updated. I see 1.1.7 at the bottom, so that may not be a factor. I do not suggest going 2.0 beta.

Also, adding an apache error handler into the mix may help load times on the database as it will report errors inside of the template.

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1363

[Faust]

I appreciate how energetic you are but there is also a good chance i wont get around to any of this for another three weeks while all my exams are on, if i do it will be bits and pieces.
the first thing i will look at is reducing the sql load of the forum, at the moment the speed for the page generating is pretty damn fast, its the sql calls that slow it down because the db is over 70 megs when zipped alone

[Reverend Jeremiah]

Im not trying to post hog or anything here, so sorry about the extra posts.

When I first looked into CMS for my arcade, I was doing the same thing that this site was doing. I had HTML with a CSS for the main site, then a forum with another CSS, and then a blog with ANOTHER CSS. Im not going to claim to know the backend of this site, but chances are you have only one database, and you have it partioned at least 3 times. The partitions alone are enough to help slow down the site. Lets say you have 50 people on the forum. Thats 50 times the CSS bets loaded. Now you have another 60 people on the main site, and if you have CSS on that that...and also if you have word press that will be more templates being loaded. In other words you will be stressing out the database after a while.

CSS was originally made to have an initial load, and then everything else run inside of the template to ease load times. I see you adding more and more partitions to the database and this isnt good.

Me, I would suggest running the ENTIRE site on a single CMS and a single database with no partitions so that, even though it may still lag a bit, it will never lag THIS much. I would suggest JOOMLA which will give you web pages, a blog, community options, a forum, merchant shops and more and it will all be inside the same template WITH a single user interface for membership across the ENTIRE spectrum of blog/community and forum. Then by adding their appache error handler you can make any and all dead pages open into your own specific error page or have them redirected to the main page.

This is just my opinion.

[Faust]

worth looking at, wont get any immediate action.

[Triple Zero]

Im not trying to post hog or anything here, so sorry about the extra posts.

When I first looked into CMS for my arcade, I was doing the same thing that this site was doing. I had HTML with a CSS for the main site, then a forum with another CSS, and then a blog with ANOTHER CSS. Im not going to claim to know the backend of this site, but chances are you have only one database, and you have it partioned at least 3 times. The partitions alone are enough to help slow down the site. Lets say you have 50 people on the forum. Thats 50 times the CSS bets loaded. Now you have another 60 people on the main site, and if you have CSS on that that...and also if you have word press that will be more templates being loaded. In other words you will be stressing out the database after a while.

CSS was originally made to have an initial load, and then everything else run inside of the template to ease load times. I see you adding more and more partitions to the database and this isnt good.

Me, I would suggest running the ENTIRE site on a single CMS and a single database with no partitions so that, even though it may still lag a bit, it will never lag THIS much. I would suggest JOOMLA which will give you web pages, a blog, community options, a forum, merchant shops and more and it will all be inside the same template WITH a single user interface for membership across the ENTIRE spectrum of blog/community and forum. Then by adding their appache error handler you can make any and all dead pages open into your own specific error page or have them redirected to the main page.

this sounds like something that would take at least half a year's work, and then another half a year to polish the errors out of? [and yes i know that Joomla is easy-peasy and deploys like a slick motherfucker or whatever, but you also know how things go versus how they are supposed to go ]

btw CSS files are generally cached very well by browsers, so they don't contribute to load. (most) spiders don't even fetch them. it's database queries that seem to suck up most of this server's load.

my vision was to have the CMS for the entire site be the WordPress blog (it's pretty good at that and doesnt suffer from feature bloat too much like Joomla or other big frameworks), configured to have (virtual) "pages" at the root and for the subpages as they are currently, the actual blog (virtual) at /blog/ and the SMF forum at the place it is now, in a physical subdirectory at /forum/.

the advantage of this would be that it can be built incrementally on what we have now, step by step, and in the end would result in a solid combination of SMF and WordPress, which are (now) two quite separate parts of the PD.com domain, anyway. the people that come to the front page generally come looking to read the Principia book, while this forum ... well it's hard to define, but let's say they didn't come looking for the Principia

i am intrigued by your ideas about optimizing SMF, though. i knew it was possible but i could never figure it out. it's a true resource hog you said you have seen the code, is it me, or do you agree it's horrible? [not that WP is much better, though so far it seems to be at least marginally so]

oh and finally let me say, i only yet took a very quick glance at your SMF theme, but from first looks, it's absolutely wonderful thanks a lot for that!