Ishimaru-Design

Ishimaru Chiaki

Geek cook

From: Somewhere in Québec

Registered: 2007-11-12

Posts: 1,444

Ishimaru Design Reloaded !

Here it comes, the new version of Ishimaru Design is finally online !

The path was very long, especially with my formation that I'm about to finish, but the new version has finally come to be stable enough for release !  This version brings alot of new features !

Host change

Since the website left Forumotion, Ishimaru Design was hosted until now on Servhome, an independant Web host that used to have a great service.  But this period will soon be history, for Servhome will close on December 31st this year.  So, I had to find a new host, but since I haven't finished my studies and I don't have a big income, a librist friend of mine who has a server gave me a part of his server to host my site.  Up to new, nothing to say about the server's stability.

Migration to FluxBB

As I was moving, I asked myself "why not finalizing and releasing the new version while the URL is known to no one in my friendlists ?".

Due to the fact that Connectix Boards that used to power this site isn't maintained anymore, changing board system was necessary to continue, in order to have an optimal security level.  For the migration, I chose FluxBB which is lightweight and not too complicated to use.

Regarding the board's data, I started from a conversion tool available on FluxBB official website, then I coded a converter to migrate a Connectix Boards forum to FluxBB.  This converter is available on GitHub for those that are interested (mostly French users).

New graphics.

The graphics has been completely redone.  Once again, we stay in green tones but this time, we turn zen with a bamboo plant shape that reminds the Asian side of this site's name.  The only pics that aren't from me (the bamboo tree and the social media icons) are under open source licenses or in the public domain (Openclipart FTW !!).  For the rest, everything was done with Gimp and Inkscape.

An icon menu on top right allows you to access to the main parts (home, resources, tutorials, forums) anytime, and in each part, you can access to the page related to this part from a submenu where you'll also find a link to change display language.

When you arrive to the site homepage, you'll see right away what are the latest tutorial and resources releases/updates, as well as the latest news.

New modules have been coded and an administration part allows to manage them.  In short, it's almost a CMS but it needs a FluxBB 1.5.x board to function.

Resources and tutorials

From now on, resources and tutorials won't be posted in forum topics anymore.  Instead, they will be posted in new modules that are specially made for their publication, in order to make them more visible.  On the same time, it allowed me to reorganize the forum index by removing two categories, then merging the support sections within the workshop categories.

All resources and tutorials were transferred to these new modules but a few of them won't be published until they are updated.

On the tutorials side, a comments system has been put into place so you can comment, wether to give your appreciation or to report an error.

All tutorials are available from this page : stripslashes($matches[1].$matches[2].$matches[3].$matches[4]).handle_url_tag($matches[5]."://".$matches[6], $matches[5]."://".$matches[6], true).stripslashes($matches[4].$matches[10].$matches[11].$matches[12])
All resources are available from this page : stripslashes($matches[1].$matches[2].$matches[3].$matches[4]).handle_url_tag($matches[5]."://".$matches[6], $matches[5]."://".$matches[6], true).stripslashes($matches[4].$matches[10].$matches[11].$matches[12])

Ishimaru Design goes opensource !

Knowing that some unnoticed bugs may still exist, and by the fact that I'm a librist myself, I decided to open the website sources, not only to facilitate bug tracking but also to make the FluxBB community benefit of my work, for those who want to make a bilingual website using FluxBB.

The sources are available on GitHub at this address : stripslashes($matches[1].$matches[2].$matches[3].$matches[4]).handle_url_tag($matches[5]."://".$matches[6], $matches[5]."://".$matches[6], true).stripslashes($matches[4].$matches[10].$matches[11].$matches[12])

what comes after ?

For now, I concentrated my work on the essentials in order to have a platform that is stable enough to open the new version before the end of this year.  But this doesn't mean that there won't be any more updates, for I am considering adding features such as allowing users to propose resources and tutorials.

Besides the already installed Mods (subforums, private messages, polls and antispam), I would like to add a few more Mods, such as the "Colorize groups", the "Predefined BBCode forms" and "Solved topics" (that I want to improve).

The development rythm will depend of my schedules, for within a few days I'm about to begin a training period for 3 weeks with a 35 hours/week schedule.

Have a nice navigation !
Ishimaru Design Admin

---

My Twitter feed