[IPB 2.1] Friendly Forms

Matt, I believe its better to produce the feedback to the right of the form field. A red x for example when the input is invalid with a small message that says “Name is already taken.”

Matt, I believe its better to produce the feedback to the right of the form field. A red x for example when the input is invalid with a small message that says “Name is already taken.” And the primary problem with AJAX is that there is no visual “your input has been accepted.” So when an input is accepted you need to do the opposite of “It has been denied” and show a green checkmark to the right of the field. This is not the only way to do this but both are required in their basic form. You need to have a visual queue it went through for the user.

Good! Its nice to see nice little features here and there!

I take it you didn’t notice the form field go red when an error was found and go green when no errors were found?

Play it again and you’ll notice that the text-input box border goes green when the input is valid.

Matt,

Merely changing the border of a text box isn’t enough. I think that is more traditionally an eye-candy effect for when the form itself is ready to accept input. I admit you do have a subtle bit of “it’s done” but it just needs more. Instead of trying to rehash my own beliefs about this I’ll forward you to a well written list of objections for AJAX. Don’t get me wrong. I love the AJAX and its an incredibly cool feature, I just think it needs to be more obvious in the aforementioned areas of whether or not the input is valid/invalid.

http://sourcelabs.com/ajb/archives/2005/05/ajax_mistakes.html

Added in a tick and a cross image.

Looks great Matt! I’m just curious.. How do you specify which validation is to be done on which form field? Is it done with a php class that generates the required javascript/ajax or is this information just specified in the html template itself?

“(The display name feature is there because of the abstracted log in procedures IPB 2.1 allows and is optional and can be turned off by the admin. The admin can also set how many name changes are allowed per 24 hour period. Also, the name changes are tracked and the ‘name change’ history can be shown to other members on the profile page).”

Very nice. You may want to create options for allowing people to change their display name x number of times per month, though. I’ve seen a lot of forums where name changing gets out of control, and even with the history, it could be rather confusing.

wow very cool matt! Nice

Matt,

That is much, much better.

Pretty nice but aren’t other things more important to develop ? The cycle release is very long (i know you are alone, i’m very aware of that) and i doubt yearly licencers are happy to download a major release + 2 fixes in a year.

Well, the display names is part of the log in abstraction, and adding the JS to the HTML took about 5 minutes.

Added in another field so that you can select how many days the name changes are counted. This effectively means you can set “n” changes per “n” days.

Looks good Matt. I would like to see 2.1 sooner rather than later please.

[Quote]The cycle release is very long (i know you are alone, i’m very aware of that)[/Quote]

That is not true. It is the opposite, IPB is the board with one of the fastest release cycles and not only this, but also the amount of new features in every release is surpassing the competition.

Nice implementation Matt ! It looks userfriendly like this.
Would be fine if there was an easy way (kind of api) to use the ajax check for custom modifications, so that you should just tell what kind of data is allowed, which query has to be run on which table, and were the error message should appear.

Little note for novice users:
Never rely only on any ajax check, as this does obviously not work if javascript is disabled. The ajax is only there to improve the “user-friendlyness”. Ajax can never prevent sql-incejtion for example.

nice but could the admin choose what colour (I am american though) the outline is? I’m color blind to red and green, blue to purple. And or group by group color. like admins can set the boarder is red and blue, and the members see black and orange.

It’s all CSS driven.

When were these checks done? ONchange? ONsubmit? I would recommend not moving the form inputs around ONchange…

Onblur and onsubmit.

“Added in another field so that you can select how many days the name changes are counted. This effectively means you can set “n” changes per “n” days.”

Perfect.

That looks really great, Matt! Excellent job!

However, I haven’t seen a blog post for that largest feature yet….

(correct if wrong) but this could acutally be that feature. or part of it.

Matt,

Its looking good. I like what I am seeing in IPB 2.1. IMO If this is a minor version change…… What are you going to do in IPB 3? Will it make dinner for me LOL?

I am curious as to one thing. Please don’t take this as complaining at all as it isn’t. How much bigger is IPB 2.1 to IPB 2? I am just wondering was there a lot of code added to make this AJAX possible? I am not familiar from a programming point of view and am anxious to see how you did what you did.

Thanks!

I’m tempted to call this IPB 2.5 - but that’s just plain silly.

IPB 3.0 will finish off what 2.1 has started and make changes to the templating system.

Once IPB 3.0 is out, do you think that will be the last version? Not that I want it to be, but by 3.0 all the features anyone could want would already be added, and really no additional changes/features could be added? Besides bug fix releases…

Woah! Wicked! I like this!

Matt,

Will IPB 2.1 have more detailed logs? Like more detailed admin,moderator logs etc….?

Aaron

“”I’m tempted to call this IPB 2.5 - but that’s just plain silly.”"

Hmm… you’re right… it just doesn’t feel like a 2.5, but it does deserve to be named like that!

Well… your version system goes like this I believe…
x.y.z
X=Major revision
Y=Minor Revision
Z=Security/Bug revision

It is your software (Well.. your company’s) so do as YOU feel is best I’ll approve of it

About the naming, I think you guys should just name it 3.0 and do all the stuff you wanted to before the release.

nice feature, thanks :)… stick with 2.1

“I’m tempted to call this IPB 2.5 - but that’s just plain silly.”

You should call it IPB 2.6 just to mock vBulletin’s silly game. You could release 5 betas before the final version and just number them sequentially.

Woah! Wicked! I like this!