ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Suggestions, complaints and news about coffeeshopdirect.com
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Lemming
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ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Lemming »

I've been fiddling with this for a few months now, on and off.

The main objective is to make it resize better onto tiny phone screens.

I made a first attempt at this a few years ago when I arranged everything into one or two columns depending on the size of the screen viewing it. That helped but was still too fixed. It was difficult to slot in new items, such as inside view, and it still didn't fit properly on certain tall narrow phones.

The new version is much more "responsive". It's also more flexible so I can add new bits and pieces.

New Features:

* inside view on many shops
* links to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for many shops
* nearest shops from every shop
* pop-up opening hours expansion (not on Apple)
* pop-up page navigation
* resizable maps

Previously there were a few links to nearby open shops on each closed shop. This was mostly based on postcodes and wasn't very accurate. The new nearby shops algorithm is much improved. As before, it only picks open shops and tries to always include at least one coffeeshop in the list.

There is a 'known issue' with the opening hours pop-up on Apple devices. I blame Apple! If there's ever going to be a problem it's always on Microsoft's bloody Internet Explorer (or whatever they call it these days :) ) and whatever Apple calls their browser. They both think they know best and ignore standards.

Anyway, the feature missing to Apple users is not significant. Also, to be fair, it is designed for a mouse interface so I should probably change it to a button that would work better on touch screens.

Please Help

I'd really appreciate your reports on anything that doesn't work well on your device or browser. Please post your findings here.


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AzLaker
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by AzLaker »

Thanks Lemming, will check it out.

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If you never do, you'll never know.
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Lemming
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Lemming »

AzLaker wrote: Sat 29th Sep 2018 02:35 pm will check it out.
Thanks man. Look forward to hearing from you.

I still haven't rolled out the new style for the forum yet. I'll do that soon.

More significant will be rolling it out for the Barcelona site. I think it will make a lot of difference there.

Meanwhile, here is a secret page just for you guys. This isn't linked from the site yet so it's a sneak preview just for you:

Shops with inside views on Google Streetview
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AzLaker
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by AzLaker »

Wow, :D :D super nice Lemming. Very slick and modern but still has the original ACD vibe. :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: :clap:

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notsofasteddie
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by notsofasteddie »

Lemming wrote: Sat 29th Sep 2018 01:26 am I've been fiddling with this for a few months now, on and off.

New Features:

* inside view on many shops
* links to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for many shops
* nearest shops from every shop
* pop-up opening hours expansion (not on Apple)
* pop-up page navigation
* resizable maps

Please Help

I'd really appreciate your reports on anything that doesn't work well on your device or browser. Please post your findings here.
I'm accessing the website using IE11 on a desktop. I didn't test the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter links, but all the other features seem like they are "go-to-go!"

The above also seems to be working using Microsoft Edge although a little more slowly.
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notsofasteddie
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by notsofasteddie »

Lemming wrote: Sat 29th Sep 2018 06:01 pm
I still haven't rolled out the new style for the forum yet. I'll do that soon.

More significant will be rolling it out for the Barcelona site. I think it will make a lot of difference there.

Meanwhile, here is a secret page just for you guys. This isn't linked from the site yet so it's a sneak preview just for you:

Shops with inside views on Google Streetview
Lemming have you started the new roll out? I noticed that the Forum was down for a while and now I don't see Icons. Good choice in my view! The icons suck up storage and more and more people don't have them. If it wasn't for Cloudmaster, I wouldn't have one!

Keep on; keeping on! Any update on the Barcelona site?

Thanks again,

Eddie
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Lemming
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Lemming »

Forum Upgrade

As you may have noticed, I've now rolled out the new page header onto the forum. Obviously most of the new stuff doesn't apply to the forum but I've also taken the opportunity to do some other updates and fixes.

The new page header means that the main menu no longer hangs off the side of the screen on a narrow phone so that should be an improvement.

When I did the last update to phpBB (version 3.2.2 of the engine that runs the forum) it didn't completely reformat the database (see here: https://coffeeshopdirect.com/forum/view ... 13&t=34666). Fortunately it didn't break down altogether and we've been staggering along for the past few months with a large red error message appearing on my admin panels.

I've finally managed to fix this and upgrade to the latest version of phpBB (3.2.3) that was released in the meantime. I've also updated all of the extensions, such as mChat, so everything is fully up-to-date now.

Google

Worryingly, traffic to the site has dropped off dramatically in the past few days. I'm not sure whether this is because I've done something wrong or whether Google marked us down for non-compliance in the old version and hasn't caught up with the new version yet. I'm hoping that it's the latter and that I've saved it just in time before we disappear into oblivion. We'll see.

Devices and Browsers

I should probably put a message on the index page to reach a wider audience but, although there's not many of you and you don't tend to explore beyond the forum, you guys tend to know your way around the Internet and the forum is a good place to discuss issues. So, if you can let me know how everything is working on your combination of device and browser, ideally with screenshots if you can do it, I'd really appreciate it.

thanks
Lem
Kermit
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Kermit »

In chat the banner at the top is missing and the clicky buttons are not clicky buttons just writing.
Image

This is on ancient iPhone 5 in safari so could be the fact it's a very old phone.
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by notsofasteddie »

Kermit wrote: Tue 2nd Oct 2018 09:40 am In chat the banner at the top is missing and the clicky buttons are not clicky buttons just writing.
Image

This is on ancient iPhone 5 in safari so could be the fact it's a very old phone.
+1 with IE11
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Lemming
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Lemming »

Thanks Kermit
I've fixed it for now by using full paths to the stylesheets and graphics
This is not ideal so I'll try to find a better fix later
I just need to figure out which directory mChat runs in!
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Lemming
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Lemming »

Have any of you guys explored beyond the forum or do I need to appeal to a wider audience?

I did some work on the embedded forum topics on the shop pages yesterday. I removed the links to profiles and various other stuff so that the posts are displayed in a simpler, cleaner form. I think this is an improvement. Ideally I'd like to remove all links from there because they don't work very well but it's a lot more complicated removing them from the post text.

Incidentally, don't forget to check out the User Control Panel. You can customise the forum quite a lot there if you wish. For instance, you can turn off avatars in last posts, move mChat to top or bottom, etc.
Hashsmoker
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Hashsmoker »

Until a few hours ago the buttons at the top (Quick links - FAQ - mChat) where messed up :mrgreen:

It's fixed now - Firefox Quantum 62.0 on Ubuntu 16.04

:mrgreen:
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Lemming
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Lemming »

Hashsmoker wrote: Tue 2nd Oct 2018 03:10 pm Until a few hours ago the buttons at the top (Quick links - FAQ - mChat) where messed up :mrgreen:

It's fixed now - Firefox Quantum 62.0 on Ubuntu 16.04

:mrgreen:
Thanks for the feedback.

As the issue went away by itself I suspect that it was an old stylesheet in the cache. This is common after an upgrade - browsers don't notice that a file has changed and use an old version already in memory. The only solution is to force them to do a full reload, which is easy on a PC (shift-F5 works on Chrome and others I think), but more fiddly on a phone. On a phone you often have to go into settings and manually clear the cache.

Fortunately they usually fix themselves eventually as you browse around the Internet and lack of memory forces them to clear the cache.

Glad it's alright now anyway.

As you're using Ubuntu I'd really appreciate your feedback on everything as I don't have anything Linux-based to test with.

thanks
Lem
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OneHighMofo
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by OneHighMofo »

Looking good here - tested on Mac OSX across all three major browsers (Safari, FF, Chrome).
Nice one Lemming. Thanks for your hard work.
Hashsmoker
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Re: ACD 20th Anniversary Edition

Post by Hashsmoker »

Lemming wrote: Tue 2nd Oct 2018 04:30 pm


As you're using Ubuntu I'd really appreciate your feedback on everything as I don't have anything Linux-based to test with.

thanks
Lem
Thanks for the explanation about cache and so - makes sense :mrgreen:

I think everything seems to work just fine under Ubuntu.
Looked at the different sections - the maps - the directory - home page - the forum itself and more.
The lay-out is fine, everything I tried is clickable and nothing is missing to me :mrgreen:
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