The theme has just been updated to its third minor version with noticeable impacts on your browsing experience. Apart from the theming changes, which are to be considered minor, the most important deployment is the preliminary new beta for
ThunderBoard beta 6.
Page previews
As you may have already noticed, when you browse to a page a neat preview of the upcoming page appears instead of a loading spinner. The site just
looks faster, but you're just being distracted by the placeholders. It is indeed a nasty trick for which I've been somewhat inspired by multiple sources, including Medium and Facebook. This is a ThunderBoard feature which will be included in the next update; it just needs your testing. Here is how it works behind the scenes:
Admin side
- You create a new ThunderBoard template, specifying the webpage attached onto it.
User side
- You visit a random page at MyBBoost.
- When the whole document has loaded, a request is performed in the background.
- Data containing the complete list of ThunderBoard templates is saved in your browser's archive, so it does not need to gather the same data on every page load. If a template is edited, it will be deployed to users immediately.
- You click on an internal link.
- ThunderBoard matches the URL you are going to with every template downloaded. If a match is found, the template is used.
- ThunderBoard parses eventual dynamic occurrences found in the webpage and edits the aforementioned template, including the data already available in the upcoming preview page.
- ThunderBoard replaces the content of the previous webpage with the edited template.
- ThunderBoard gets the new page and replaces the preview template with it.
Very basic. Much simple. Wow.
Page previews feature was built using separate, ThunderBoard's specific templates. As of today, only 4 templates (profiles, threads, posts and the whole user control panel) are available just for demonstration purposes. The final version will get much more templates that will cover every fine aspect of MyBBoost.
Customization has been top priority while building this feature, and it really paid off: you can include whatever variable you want, and ThunderBoard will search for it in the current page to include that piece of information in the preview page. CSS classes are supported and encouraged; if not found, ThunderBoard will fallback to the special
data-tb-{variable} attribute you can add to your standard templates in order to let it be grabbed during page previewing.
There are deeper subfeatures which I will explain in details in ThunderBoard's upcoming update.
New loading bar
A new loading bar is available. It looks like the one I used prior to the spinner, but this one features an improved visibility handler which
does not hide the bar when the new page arrives, but lets it finish the animation instead. It looks much better than before. This is inspired by Medium's loading bar, and the core is available as
an open source project. Note that ThunderBoard uses a slightly modified version.
Hovercards at its very best
Hovercards preview has received small but solid updates in the last few days which should mark the end of the front-end development phase. Popovers are shown consistently and with a greatly proof-tested code. Just the backend implementation missing to the first beta release.
Minor theme changes and fixes
Minor issues, such as
Liking a post redirects to xmlhttp.php and
Success Message doesn't bring me to previous page, have been solved within today's update together with minor styling touch ups.
MyBBoost now under version control
I have been able to update my developer skills and enter the awesome git world lately. On the wave of enthusiasm and power of will (and free time of course!) I have set up a git environment on MyBBoost's server, so I now have a local copy ever up to date with the site. All the new features have been developed locally and lined up with a git push. That surely looks so easy! What have I been missing all these years... This is a crucial leap forward faster developing and testing new features. I will share some tips and tricks I've been using lately to accomplish my tasks in the MyBB team, for sure.