Icy Phoenix

Hi all,
I wanted to report that yesterday I made one of the biggest commitment to GIT repository for Icy Phoenix.

It was quite a lot of time I was working on a code conversion to adapt current template base to HTML 5 requirements and finally I managed to update most of the files (it required few weeks...).

Let me explain the reason.

In the last few years web coding changed a lot:

1. Internet usage increased exponentially... and internet now a day it is used not only to look for news, software or interesting articles... but mostly for social networking. This means that websites should deal more and more with multimedia (images and videos) and "instant" interfaces (nobody wants to wait ages for pages loading or wants to click on several links before getting contents).
   
2. HTML 5 brought a great new user experience to the web, and most browsers supports it correctly... maybe finally we have a real standard?
   
3. JavaScript was almost deprecated until 5/10 years ago... now a day we have jQuery which was really able to brought a great user experience to all web apps. It's a standard for most websites.
   
4. CSS 3 is quite stable (diffused and well supported by all browsers) and there are a lot of techniques that can be used for styling pages both for computers and "smart" devices.
   
5. Frameworks: there are a lot of framework, classes and snippet that are greatly maintained by other vendors that can be used to enhance web apps. Long life to OPEN SOURCE!

Apart from lacking of developers and interest... Icy Phoenix has a quite old infrastructure under several aspects.

I made my best with my limited amount of free time to improve the core code, at least by coding classes. Still a lot should be done to "modernize" all the rest.

I do not expect Icy Phoenix to get some new interest, because it's quite an old and "dead" project... but I'll try to bring some freshness to the codebase and here is what I'm planning to do (still with my limited availability of free time):

1. Create a new HTML 5 template, hopefully responsive for main pages (forum, viewforum and viewtopic).
   
2. Clean some old JS code and features.
   
3. Integrate few extra AJAX features to improve or speed up user experience.
   
4. Optimize templates, images and scripts to speed up page loading.

When I have finished with these, I'll try to move (or even recode from scratch) album as a plugin which is really obsolete.

I need help in HTML 5 conversion, even just for navigating through all pages to make sure everything is working fine... so if you have some free time to offer to the project, just let me know.

That's all for now... let me know your thoughts.

You could merge Icy Phoenix with the CMS only edition by moving forum as a plugin (just kidding)

Thanks for your work, I update my site ASAP

I can't even remember -- is there stuff still using Prototype.js ?

Yep! What with html5, CSS 3, responsive div's and jQuery it's like starting all over again.

Wish I had the time and the interest to bother with it, but by the time I learn something new - It's already deprecated.

So I don't bother any more........

zsolti10 wrote: [View Post]

You could merge Icy Phoenix with the CMS only edition by moving forum as a plugin (just kidding)

That was the original intention.

But since I realized that too many things were obsolete, I decided to stop the CMS until I have a new codebase at least for HTML, CSS and JS. I'm working on it, but I guess it will require a lot.

Informpro wrote: [View Post]

I can't even remember -- is there stuff still using Prototype.js ?

I don't think so.

I'm in the process of removing JS stuff and trying to recode portion of old JS code (translating to jQuery for cross-browser compatibility).

mort wrote: [View Post]

Wish I had the time and the interest to bother with it, but by the time I learn something new - It's already deprecated.

I can understand your frustration and I often feel like you mentioned... everything is too fast... and I'm still old fashion.