Building a Forum - Part 2

Web Development
13th September 2022 Building a Forum - Part 2

After a little break from development, I'm back on building a new forum from scratch. In Building a Forum Part 1, I talked about some design changes and what problems I need to overcome as the development progresses.

I've been doing a lot of research, and I'm still yet to decide on how to work specific parts. So, instead of halting development whilst I work on that, I've decided to work on other parts. If I can get the majority of the rest built, then hopefully, the other pieces will come to me.

Forum Profiles

The profile pages are a bit bland at present. So for the redesign, I wanted to make them a bit more practical. The forum offers some colour customisation - accent colours - which change the colours of links. But this will become prominent on the profile page.

The accent colour is used as the background of your profile picture. It's also used as a background for a quote, which is up to 150 characters from your last comment on the forum. I needed to limit this because some comments are thousands of characters long, and there's just no need to see that on your own profile page. A little snippet, though, is nice.

4W Forums new profile page

There'll be three additional menu options within the profile section.

1. Update Settings. This is where you can change your email address associated with the forum, what colour accent you want to use, timezone or add any social media links.

2. Change Password. Keeping this separate from other settings because I always like to keep passwords separate from other settings. It is its own thing. It also gives me room to write down password complexity recommendations.

3. Inbox. Users like to send private messages. It's especially helpful when it comes to the e-wrestling games where they can bounce ideas off each other in private where no one else is going to see spoilers until the matches are posted. It's not a priority, though, so will be one of the last parts added. This section, though, will be related to the personal settings of the inbox. Whether a user wants to receive email notifications of a new inbox item, if they want a board notification or even whether they want to disable the feature. Not everyone will want people contacting them through it.

Forum Colours

The plan is to have between five and ten colour schemes available for users to select from. To start with, mainly during the initial build, I'll start with just three.

The default will be a nice shade of blue. The secondary will be yellow, as shown in the above screenshot. And the third is fuchsia. I haven't decided what the others will be yet, but will likely include green, red and purple. I just need to decide on the exact colours whilst keeping accessibility in mind - all colours need to be perfectly readable no matter what someone chooses. This will be helped by my choice to remove the option to select either a light or dark background. With one set background colour, picking an accent colour that suits is a lot easier than picking colours that work on two opposing background colours.