Dear God ….. light orange and light text on a light grey background. Someone's idea of 'neat' is not always readable for users.  I don't even want to bother reading the tutorial to do the install.

Hate to be negative on my first post but readable is the first thing I look for in a software.  I liked OCP and wanted to give this a try but honestly the over use of the colour orange has done me in.

Lou
 

The theme on the Compo.sr site is custom, and the one included in the release is an updated ocPortal theme in blue (as depicted on the home page screenshot).

  Whoops, I am taking about this site.  The light orange, light grey, light what ever, the shaded out buttons until you hover. All garbage in my opinion and add nothing to any site.  Bad idea all the way around and if this is the default forum for Composr then I will use SMF or something else for the forum part.  I really don't think folks come to any site with a 'treasure hunt' expectation looking for the hidden stuff or Easter Eggs.  There is smart marketing and there is stupid marketing.


As for my install, it has been delayed due to mod_sec and I have heard a few minutes ago from my ISP.  I will work with them on that issue and then install Composr.  Does Composr toss up its mod_sec warning for any particular rule or for mod_sec in general?

Thanks,

Lou

 

A few examples below. No need for the invisible stuff. I don't care much for adding an attachement and having the screen go dark. No need to exercise my pupils just so a designer can over use the background effect. Really not sure why I get a second prompt box.  Adding an attachement should not require a screen being darkened and a pop up for additonal features.

Not bitching for the sake of bitching but there is no need to complicate a forum and overuse CSS3 or HTML 5.  I will try Composr and if it works well for me I will use SMF or another forum for the board.

Personally, I see a light orange background on both areas using Firefox. No grey for me anywhere, so would be helpful to know what browser you are using. In fairness, the theme on this site is really a side issue when it comes to your decision to try the RC as it isn't really indicative of the default theme Composr uses.

I am pretty sure the issues you highlighted will be resolved but I really suggest that you try the actual RC if you are in a position/mindset to provide feedback on any issues you may find. I do agree that the white text on the orange buttons is a bit of an eye strainer but quite easily rectified along with the other things you mentioned.

I am using FF 42.  

Not sure I am moving forward on this. I eventually took out ocP due to it too strenuous security.  I do have Composr installed but can't get pass the login due to not enough memory. I have a php.ini in /sources and root with mem set to 64 and still no joy.

As for this site, it is utterly stupid that when I login the 'stay in forever' is perma checked. If I don't uncheck that then I get two effin pop up boxes. No one needs to presume I want to stay logged in forever. Second is the default to the forum is not Linear. I have to choose linear everytime. Sucks.

Frankly, I am just not getting the mindlessness behind the site here. The 'pallette' has moving icons that do nothing. Click on it and it does nothing. You have to click on the button.  No need to have a moveable icon if that is all it does.  Once on the pallette the white to grey color cuts a paragraph in half. Sorry, but this site is too different for me to bother to learn it in order to use or get support for Composr.

Not sure what I will do just yet. I am not 15 years old and all giddy about new and senseless bobbles. I am 60 and don't have time for senseless changes for the sake of being different.

I suspect Composer is just what I need for a client but I will not battle to make it work.

OK … I am finished and uninstalling Composr. I can now login but I get memory allocation fails in tempcode.php.

I remember now the reason I moved away from ocPortal was it would not out of the box work with most Apache servers. The same seems true with Composr.  I can install damn near anything and it works out of the box; as much as I want to give this a go I am not willing to overcome what should be a simple and basic installation.

Sorry

I have had no problem at all running ocPortal or Composr on Apache servers but I am sorry to hear you are experiencing issues. We must remember that Composr isn't released as stable yet, so until it is then we can expect various bugs to occur along the way (the majority of which get posted on the tracker and are quickly dealt with). However, If Composr is not for you that's fine, there are plenty of alternatives out there to choose from.

Lou, thank you for your feedback, and we will look into all this, but please don't be so rude about it. We will look into your issues, but unless you're paying people a lot of money to help you, you shouldn't be so discourteous to people producing stuff for free   .

light orange and light text on a light grey background.

Can you point out specifically please, I'm not seeing any light orange text.

I would definitely agree the drop-down menus lack contrast and that the forum post background is a little jarring, both those will be fixed. Also the buttons.

You posted some screenshots in the next post, but I can't for the life of me work out how to reproduce them, including on Firefox. There's a dark grey background in the screenshots instead of the white background, and what looks like some kind of browser addon allowing element resizing on the posts. I wonder if it's a case of you having some browser addon(s) installed that is overridding some design styles. As I read KingBast could not reproduce here, and he's tested just about everything in a lot of bizarre web browsers ;-).

Adding an attachment should just be producing a file selection window immediately, with no screen darkening and no separate prompts. If you post something like a Jing screencast I can have a closer look.

the over use of the colour orange has done me in.

If we're violating colour contrast rules or some fundamental design truths, we'd fix that as a bug. But choice of colour generally would be a matter of taste. Starbucks loves green, McDonalds loves red; maybe those are not the best examples as personally I can't say I particularly love those and many don't, but it really is a matter of opinion all that, and strong colours are good for creating a distinct/memorable brand.

As Kingbast says, orange is purely a compo.sr thing, not the default theme. The theme wizard lets you pick whatever base colour you want anyway.

the shaded out buttons until you hover … stupid marketing

I assume you are talking about the buttons on the forum under posts. This is to stop distracting people (drawing the eyes) with things that may only be used like 1% of the time - so it's actually designed to improve readability, nothing to do with marketing.
We can compromise on it a bit though, I'll reduce the level of the fading.

All garbage in my opinion / utterly stupid / sucks / mindlessness / senseless / stupid marketing

This is where you were really rude: when you talk like that it's like if you were invited into someone's home and started calling the art on the wall garbage. You can make your points without behaving like this, so please take note.

Composr is for making advanced websites, so jumping in, being really rude, then disappearing before anyone has had a chance to properly go through your feedback, is unlikely to work well for you or make you any friends. You need to be patient and willing to work with people, and also frankly pay people for support rather than expecting a free lunch.

Does Composr toss up its mod_sec warning for any particular rule or for mod_sec in general?

Kind of.

What we do is execute a web request with a path in the parameters, which ModSecurity may think is some kind of path injection attack. We then see if that was blocked.

We do this because we need to be able to save paths in the configuration section (or just generally people may input them in unpredictable ways, e.g. as a field in a catalogue entry).

It's not really designed specifically to catch out any one problem, it's more like a 'testing the waters' thing.

We're not able to directly read ModSecurity rules, and the rule sets are configurable anyways, so we couldn't keep track of them properly. There is a tutorial about ModSecurity with some known problematic rules.

I do have Composr installed but can't get pass the login due to not enough memory. I have a php.ini in /sources and root with mem set to 64 and still no joy.

Composr actually overrides the memory settings. What this could be is if there are lots of PHP extensions, or possibly a 64 bit PHP build, using more memory than we expected. I'll run some tests. The PHP memory consumption varies significantly from one PHP environment to another unfortunately.

[On remember me login option] If I don't uncheck that then I get two effin pop up boxes

I can't reproduce. Perhaps the popups are coming from the browser itself?

There's a config option to control the default state of that checkbox, so you can default it to off on your own site if you wish.

We could use a cookie to remember the value of that checkbox, but ironically that would set us up against EU privacy leglislation as we are meant to only opt-into cookies, and this is for an opt-out feature. But we could ignore that if we made it configurable - I've added 0002642: Remember if "remember me" is unchecked - Composr CMS feature tracker

Second is the default to the forum is not Linear. I have to choose linear everytime. Sucks.

Well, you're posting in the Website Comment Topics forum, which is intended for discussing posted Composr news etc. I've just edited the forum to make this clearer.

I do think it is best to have all users provided the same initial setting per-forum to reduce the chance of people ignoring reply structure in a threaded forum.

Frankly, I am just not getting the mindlessness behind the site here. The 'pallette' has moving icons that do nothing. Click on it and it does nothing

This is a specific bug and will be fixed now that I'm aware.

Once on the pallette the white to grey color cuts a paragraph in half.

Sorry, not sure what you mean here.

I remember now the reason I moved away from ocPortal was it would not out of the box work with most Apache servers.

It does, but there may of course in any case be some specific issue blocking it. Maybe it's you have lots of PHP extensions installed and 64bit for example, but actually I haven't seen a report of memory going over in normal usage in quite some time so it's likely something pretty specific to the kinds of server environment(s) you've tried. Of course we'll fix it if we're able to reproduce a problem, and I'm going to take a look now.

light orange and light text on a light grey background.

Other than the light grey background which I am not seeing in FF, I took this as meaning the white (light text) on the light orange buttons as that isn't particularly easy on the eye. I could be wrong of course, but the comments all seemed to be directed at the forum in particular.

So I took ~3h last night looking into memory. The front page on my machine was using about 22MB if I remember correctly, and with some optimisation I got it down to about 18MB (worth my time, I shave off some CPU too when I found some unnecessary work was going on).

22MB is a long way from the 64MB which we reserve at boot-up. Even if we double it up to account for possible 64bit and PHP extension overhead, that's still not that high. (64 bit isn't really going to use double the memory, maybe more like 30% more).

However, not all web hosts let us do our memory reservation, e.g. suhosin has it's own memory restriction, PHP safe mode locks the setting, and some hosts (e.g. 1&1) have a hacked-up PHP with a lower limit. It would be interesting to know what the memory limit error is here, if it says it's used up 64MB, or some lower value - if it was a lower value, something is blocking us (and your config too) from raising it up.

Anyway, whatever it is, hopefully my optimisation has made it less likely to happen.

Ah yes, thanks, they I think I've got the more obvious issues fixed for the next site update. https://github.com/ocproducts/composr/commit/5a7bdd2f54b8f62747cc83f8b0aaffecbb3b262a