more improvements

I'll rundown a few other minor changes made to the forums and touch on a somewhat controversial addition to STR.

Minor Changes

• Background of photo pages in gallery are now a gray instead of teal color
• "Posting Rules" box which are the ones that say things like "you may post. you may create threads, etc" is now collapsed by default. Figured people rarely looked at this and it was just taking up space.
  
• Small CSS mishandling by Safari was fixed. The panoramic photo in the header would stretch all the way to the right and not be confined by the borders. One line of code fixed this.
• Guests now see a new ad. The first post of every thread now contains an ad for people who are unregistered or not logged in. Logged in users don't see this ad.

Road forum added

Recently there have been 'roadie' threads spread out throughout the forums. Soon thereafter the roadies began to ask for their own forum. And they got it.

Yes, it's true. SocalTrailRiders now has a roadie forum! I never envisioned STR having a roadie forum when I first built this site two years ago. However, I believe that the site has evolved and is as dynamic as any other community. The mountain bikers who also road ride made themselves heard and it was clear that there would be more roadie threads in the future.

Many argue to keep STR small. They believe that there isn't enough activity to dilute the posts between even more forums. To a certain extent they are right. So I decided to come to this compromise:

• Ladies of STR was deleted
• Girls Club, a private girls-only forum, was kept
• The Roadie Hangout was added

This accomplished a few things. First, we got rid of the Ladies forum which was getting very little activity. I decided to keep girls club so that girls can still have a place for those women-only topics. The private girls club is not viewable by anyone else; this means that the deleting of Ladies of STR and the addition of the Roadie Hangout forum cancel each other out in terms of number of forums. And last but not least, all the present and future road-related threads will be kept off of the rest of the forums. This should make most everyone happy (I hope).

Final stage of redesign is done on STR

Forums Get a New Look

The forums now have a similar style to the rest of the forums and at the risk of sounding cocky - it looks damn good!

I found the direct compliment of the darker brown that was used on the rest of the website and it turned out to be a blue/teal'ish color. I really like how it accents the brown. Most of the rest was kept neutral, either gray or black. Link have an orange hover state.

Long Time Coming

I've wanted SocalTrailRiders.org to have a consistent look and feel throughout the website for a long time now.

The old design, with it's bar on the left and vertical navigation, didn't lend itself to well to having a forum style created out of it. This created a big problem as I couldn't simply style a header and footer template but would have had to customize many templates, found a way to style those with the same CSS as the rest of the website, and it just would have been a big mess.

I created the V3 redesign with this in mind. That's why I included horizontal tabs, a rectangle header section, and a consistent footer. This enabled me to easily adapt the design to a forum style. Luckily it worked out well.

One More Thing . . .

Created a DVD case and sweet cover for the STR Volume 1 DVD. People who get one tomorrow at the Blackstar/Motorway ride will get a treat!

Enjoy!