Tables make for an ugly mobile experience and little that can be done to make it look better. Divs utilizing the table display attribute can be easier managed to make mobile and responsive themes.
Agreed. It would be nicer if new development initiatives were taken up by the developers. It's unfortunate that, when people ask questions about Chronoforums, the responses one sees from various forum moderators is "I don't know anything about Chronoforums, but ...". Although the forum moderators here do their best to attempt to help those of us seeking help, it underscores the dearth of available development effort for this particular Joomla extension.
Keep in mind that it's "slim pickings" when it comes to finding a low-cost forum product for your Joomla website. The main choices (I guess) lie between implementing a bridge between Joomla and phpBB or using Joomla "natively". On the "native" side, the main contenders are Kunena and Chronoforums; there are other products but, from what I've seen of them, they are not enjoying the same level of "popularity" as the ones I've mentioned.
I understand, of course, that the developer of Chronoforums probably gets next-to-nothing in return for his hard work and, when there's no incentive—at least, in a financial sense—it becomes increasingly difficult to re-energise one's earlier motivation. I get it. I know this as a person who has developed Joomla extensions and offered them for sale. Even though I see dozens of visitors where my own products and services are available, no-one's buying anything. I don't see my efforts translated into anything that compensates me for a fraction of the amount of time I invested in constructing what I offer for sale. So, when there's no financial incentive to do anything, what future can we expect of Chronoforums?
It's ironic, isn't it, that people spend money for peripheral nonsense (like "SEO enhancement" for example) when you don't need to pay anything—in fact, and many of these so-called improvements/enhancements actually cause more headaches than they're supposed to cure—and are not prepared to pay for something that actually generates content on their websites. People spend their money on gimmicks, in playing the popularity game, yet expect that a forum component—something that visitors to their websites actually interact with—should be available at zero cost?
I agree that it would be nice if the several ideas I've read about improving Chronoforums were seriously taken up. Chronoforums 1.1.5 has been around for the past 9 months. In terms of style, it has a lot going for it (leaving out the issue of <DIV> vs. <TABLE>) but, in terms of structure it requires a thorough overhaul. Remembering that Chronoforums is not MVC-compliant, it's like a J! 1.5 component that was given band-aid surgery to allow it to work with J! 2.5-3.x, until this basic matter of MVC compliance is addressed (and this is going to require a significant development effort) I suspect that there will be a drag in turning out small improvements such as a new forum template design that refactors <TABLE> elements as <DIV>.
Good luck in seeing these ideas come to fruition.
Keep in mind that it's "slim pickings" when it comes to finding a low-cost forum product for your Joomla website. The main choices (I guess) lie between implementing a bridge between Joomla and phpBB or using Joomla "natively". On the "native" side, the main contenders are Kunena and Chronoforums; there are other products but, from what I've seen of them, they are not enjoying the same level of "popularity" as the ones I've mentioned.
I understand, of course, that the developer of Chronoforums probably gets next-to-nothing in return for his hard work and, when there's no incentive—at least, in a financial sense—it becomes increasingly difficult to re-energise one's earlier motivation. I get it. I know this as a person who has developed Joomla extensions and offered them for sale. Even though I see dozens of visitors where my own products and services are available, no-one's buying anything. I don't see my efforts translated into anything that compensates me for a fraction of the amount of time I invested in constructing what I offer for sale. So, when there's no financial incentive to do anything, what future can we expect of Chronoforums?
It's ironic, isn't it, that people spend money for peripheral nonsense (like "SEO enhancement" for example) when you don't need to pay anything—in fact, and many of these so-called improvements/enhancements actually cause more headaches than they're supposed to cure—and are not prepared to pay for something that actually generates content on their websites. People spend their money on gimmicks, in playing the popularity game, yet expect that a forum component—something that visitors to their websites actually interact with—should be available at zero cost?
I agree that it would be nice if the several ideas I've read about improving Chronoforums were seriously taken up. Chronoforums 1.1.5 has been around for the past 9 months. In terms of style, it has a lot going for it (leaving out the issue of <DIV> vs. <TABLE>) but, in terms of structure it requires a thorough overhaul. Remembering that Chronoforums is not MVC-compliant, it's like a J! 1.5 component that was given band-aid surgery to allow it to work with J! 2.5-3.x, until this basic matter of MVC compliance is addressed (and this is going to require a significant development effort) I suspect that there will be a drag in turning out small improvements such as a new forum template design that refactors <TABLE> elements as <DIV>.
Good luck in seeing these ideas come to fruition.
I've never had much luck when it comes to stability when I tried standalone forums that use bridges such as the one I used for phpBB3, Too many things could and did go wrong. I used to think this forum was the perfect answer, but the lack of development or even bug fixes lead me to believe this is a dead project and thus i'm once again on the hunt for decent forum software and am once again forced to put my 50k users through another migration...
Ive gone about changing the code myself to fix this, not going anywhere near the MVC issues this thing has, but atleast I can make the UI a little more friendly. For the sake of saving time and headache I'm just hacking it in by directly changing the <table> <tr> and <td> to <div class="cf-table"> <div class="cf-table-row"> and <div class="cf-table-cell"> respectively. not as nice as a proper ground up view model utilizing divs, but will allow me enough control to make it presentable in mobile through CSS.
Will post the modified files when complete for anybody else that would like to take advantage.
Will post the modified files when complete for anybody else that would like to take advantage.
Yep, your idea looks like a workable stop-gap but, like I've written elsewhere, unless the component is redesigned using Joomla MVC, ChronoForums will have long-term problems. As you wrote, DIVs are on the whole better to use than TABLEs.
It would also be a good idea to be able to use language overrides instead of hacking the CF language file.
It would also be a good idea to be able to use language overrides instead of hacking the CF language file.
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