Ishimaru-Design

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

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Hello,

First of all, I wish you a Happy New Yeur 2012 and I hope that your new year had a nicer beginning than mine, for last Monday I fell on the stair landing becaise I didn't see the shoe that was lying on the floor and that was almost the same color than the carpet while the stairs were dimly lit.  This resulted in a light sprain at my right ankle and so, I worked on my PC while having my foot on a seat, with an ice bag on my ankle.  My foot is still sensitive today, but I almost stopped limping.

So, while I was having the ice bag on my ankle, I updated my phpBB3 styles to make them compatible with phpBB 3.0.10 that was released a few hours earlier.  As the codechanges were quite minor, thanks to the template inheritance, my revisions were validated on phpBB.com a few hours after I submitted them.

So I just updated them (+ the style infos on the site and the board) and I sent the links to phpBB-fr.com.  Now all is left is the update on phpBBHacks.com.

Talking about phpBBHacks, I announce you that I finished second on phpBBHacks.com's Top 5 Style authors of 2011, as you can see on this link.

In the next news, I'll give you some news about the progress of the site's future version, for the Holidays aren't the best period for coding.

Ishimaru Chiaki

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Ishimaru Design is wishing you a merry Christmas with your beloved ones !  Enjoy good food, and drink with moderation !

I take this opportunity to give you some news regarding the progress of this site's future version.

By the fact that lately I became co-developer of Connectix Boards (since the beginning of this month), following a urgent situation (a security flaw in the latest stable version has been reported to us), I had less time for ID v6's development. But I took the time to work on it during the last week after I finally could solve an annoying bug in my upload and thumbnail generation script for the downloadable resources management.  For this, I thank FluxBB.fr community for their help.

After solving this bug, I now have almost finished the resources management and display part.  After, I still have to finish the tutorials parts, the static pages and the site settings.  So I can say that around 75% of what I planned is done, even if I had to drop the screenshot multi-upload feature.

I still cannot give a release date, for it depends of my occupations and I don't want to revive the same situation than when I released ID v5 on July 2009, for which I didn't test enough and thus, I had to do many bugfixes after the release, as if it wasn't enough to have a power outage that made the maintenance last 16 hours instead of 5.
So this time, I want to make sure to do enough testing in order to fix as many bugs as possible before releasing ID v6.  I am also considering opening the source code by uploading the files to Github, in order to let contributors find and report bugs and security flaws.

But I won't forget the screenshots, once everything is almost finished !

Enjoy your holidays !

Regards
Ishimaru Chiaki

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After three months of waiting that looked like an eternity to me, the last pending style on phpBB.com has finally been approved yesterday !

Following this approval, I just made some bugfixes in my archives while comparing with the ones from phpBB.com, in order to release these updates here and on other phpBB-related sites.

All styles have just been updated here and a PM containing links has been sent to phpBB-fr.com

Regarding Prostylize styles

On the same time, I must bring your attention to a change in the available styles since the release of ColorizeIt support on phpbb.com
This module which is now integrated within Titania which is the platform that runs phpBB.com's customization database, allows colorizing any style that supports it.  This means that a style that is originally blue can be obtained in green, red, violet, yellow, etc. in a few clicks !

This makes that all Styles authors who made styles having variants (such as my Prostylize styles or CyberAlien's AcidTech and Hestia styles), me included, had to choose one variant to keep for each style set.

But in my case, even if Prostylize Darkgrey is the most downloaded variant, grey colors cannot be colorized.  I thus had to choose between the red variant and the blue variant.  I finally chose the blue variant because it is more downloaded than the red one, and because blue is more all-purpose than red.

So, if you want the grey variant, you will have to go to the following link, then use the "Change colours" link in order to desaturate the blue colors : http://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/style … _darkblue/

And news from the website's future version

And for those who don't follow me on Twitter, here are some news.

Even if it didn't progress as fast as I could wish, the public part is almost finished and I began working on the admin part for which the homepage is done and the resources part is currently in progress.

When the coding will have progressed enough, some testing will be possible and I thus will be able to take a few screenshots in order to give you a glimpse of the future version.

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Hello,

Having closed our fifth wheel trailer for winter and learnt that I won't go to Montreal this WE, I can finally code even on WE and so, the future version of ID can finally progress faster.

Take note that the requests will stay closed until the next version is released, for the stickies seriously need a refresh and I already have a lot of work to do outside ID's coding.

Stay tuned, wether on this site or via my Twitter thread.

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Hello,

I am glad to announce that my forced break following my computer issues has come to its end !

I would have liked to installed Ubuntu's bootloader on the system's partition, but all my attempts, with Ubuntu-fr.org users' help, have failed.  So I finally reinstalled GRUB where it used to be before I had Windows XP reinstalled, and now I'm back on Ubuntu, where I can access to my tools and data.

I can thus do support from now.

I also announce that I am now on Twitter, so you can follow me at this link in order to stay tuned about the work progress on Ishimaru Design's future version and my other projects.  And don't worry if some of my tweets are in French.

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Hello,

The server that hosts Ishimaru Design and my three other sites was having problems.  Sometimes, the server didn't respond ("Server not found" message under Firefox), sometimes only MySQL wasn't responding, and sometimes the websites were accessible, but for only short periods of time.  These downtimes were usually sparse and short, but this time, it happened at the worst moment, as the admin is on vacation from July 8 to July 17 with no internet access.  I thus had to leave a message on his Facebook wall in order to ask his friends to try to contact him for emergency.  Once he'll be back, he will surely post about this issue on the support forum (sorry, French only), so stay tuned !

But since I'll be on vacation from July 14th to July 31st, I wrote this message in advance, so when you'll read these lines, I'll probably have left already.  So, in order to have this message delivered and to have this board monitored, I gave the accesses and backups to Tristou and Blackhawk which are two people I had as colleagues in past projects and that I can trust.

I am sorry for the inconveniences that are out of my control.

Cordially,
Ishimaru Chiaki

ps : The works on this site's future version are progressing nicely.  The migration script to convert this board to FluxBB has just been finished and I began to adapt the website so it can function with FluxBB 1.4 sessions.  This migration became necessary, for we have no news from CB's developer for a few months aready, which isn't a good sign regarding the maintenance.

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With the release of Debiain 6.0 "Squeeze", the new version of the GNU/Linux distro that runs the server where Ishimaru Design is hosted, the (Servhome) host admins have upgraded Debian to this new version.

So, until yesterday, Servhome used PHP 5.2 and the admins preferred to wait before upgrading to 5.3 in order to give time to developers to adapt their CMS for PHP 5.3 handlling.  With the new Debian version, the PHP 5.2 branch isn't supported anymore and so, Servhome had just upgraded to PHP 5.3.

As Connectix Boards hasn't been updated since 2008, even if the first beta of CB 1.0 has been revealed, I cannot guarantee the absence of bugs due to migration.

At first view, everything seem to work fine, especially as I already use PHP 5.3 on my local server since I upgraded my Ubuntu to 10.04.  But you might encounter some errors or strange behaviors after this upgrade and so, don't hesitate to report them here.

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I haven't thought I'd do it tonight, but finally I didn't drink that much (1 glass of pink wine + 1 Alex Keith's Dark Ale + 1 glass of white wine), but I was so full that I couldn't eat or drink anymore when I came back from the Christmas Eve party, I even had trouble finishing my white wine and my coffee, ;D !

By the way, regarding phpBB3 styles, I took the time to update them on the forum and the website tonight.  It's now up-to-date in English and French sides.

Take note that all my phpBB3 styles now inherit from prosilver and so, you MUST have the prosilver template present and installed on your board before installing one of my styles !  If you already installed a previous version of one of my styles, you will have to reinstall its template in order to make template inheritance work !

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For all Ishimaru-Design members, I wish you a merry Christmas !

As a gift, I announce you that the future webdesign colours are almost final, and some extra touch-ups will be necessary before I begin its integration that is announced to be long.

Here's a preview : View the screenshot

For those that might have noticed, I haven't updated the phpBB3 styles on this site yet, I will do it within the next days, but not tomorrow (or today if midnight has already passed in your region) as it will depend on my post-party shape.  But you can download them on phpbb.com.

Have a nice Christmas night for those who go to a party !

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