Yes we will have changes in the printed format.
The design will be a text only link. When you click it the content of the topic will generated as xml and passed through a modified version of the RSS process we already use to produce feed presentation on the home page and tech_news page, but with user profile preferences to do the styling. That will give an alternate presentation for easy reading end to end and will be printer friendly without any additional special special handling.
I looked at a couple of mods for "printer friendly phpBB but what they end up with is pretty ugly, so I looked at doing it with alternate style sheets and a little code manipulation; but there is a lot of trash code that does not lend itself to CSS... SO ... rather than try and make a clay brick look like marble, I will combine the styling methods being used on the content side (which is printer friendly) in combination with what we have learned to do with RSS to do an independent verson of the page for viewing and print. The normal interface will still be crappy until we re-write most of it, but we should see major improvemenets as part of the changes and additions that are ongoing.
Sean, when you are free to take stuff on, let me know and we can see what the priorities are at that point. A lot of the pieces on the both the frontend and the back end are the result of members having some time and looking for ways to make the site better. There are a bunch of things near going live, like personal subdomains for members, free email with no ads for members, custom RSS feed, new layout, new navigation and value added external content like satelite weather, and dictionary look up from partner sites. Then behind that is a second wave with much tigher server side code, much more interactive, customiazable and flexibile forums, sponsored forums and subdomains, online forum to article edit tools, and private rooms withing forums.
The long term wish list can be anything we want it to be, and we can make whatever we want to happen a reality by just doing it.
:^)
printer friendly's for some wierd reason appear to do better at Google,
Think about it. Making pages printer friendly frequently makes them much more accessible, especially for the visually impaired. To quote Duz:
"Spiders are blind..." Making a site accessible is very good SEO because.
