Forum Discussion

caseygum's avatar
caseygum
Guide
5 years ago

Why are the discussion styles all so different?

I'm not really expecting an answer, but I just need to vent a little...

We are new to Lithium, having just migrated a 250k+ user community from Jive to Lithium. One thing that I have found very frustrating when styling the community is that each "discussion style" looks like it was implemented in total isolation, with very little consistency with respect to page elements and HTML structure.  Sometimes the author details are above the title, sometimes below.  Sometimes the author details aren't present at all.  Sometimes you can reply or give kudos to a comment, sometimes you can't.  Even the rendering of things like attachments, tags, and labels following the message/article body might render in different order, or different styles, or with different HTML elements.  This makes styling a community so time-consuming.

What gives?  Is there a reason for this?  I can certainly imagine that this makes professional services contracts more lucrative, but I think a little TLC and coordination between Dev and UI/UX would be much appreciated by customers doing skinning in-house.  As a dev, I would say this violates DRY principle (don't repeat yourself).  As a UI/UX person, I would say it violates affordance consistency.  Imagine if every room in your house placed the light switch in a different place and at a different height?

  • StanGromer's avatar
    StanGromer
    Boss
    5 years ago

    Honestly, what you described is exactly why - the various pieces that make up "Khoros Communities" were all built up over the past decade - Often by different teams, during different strategies that Lithium/Khoros has gone through over the years.  To their credit, a lot of this is was built before modern web/design principals existed.  There is a lot of work underway I know towards future enhancements, but in the short-term you don't have a ton of great options beyond rebuilding a lot of the core functionality or doing your best as you said with restyling it.

    We've been slowly rebuilding pieces over the past 6-9 months, but it is honestly a struggle because some elements/features simply work different between the node types, and aligning everything is dang near impossible.

  • CarolineS's avatar
    CarolineS
    Boss
    5 years ago
    caseygum wrote:

      Imagine if every room in your house placed the light switch in a different place and at a different height?

    😂

    I have heard rumor of a complete frontend rewrite of Khoros being underway? Can't remember who or when I heard this, so I am only guilty of spreading an unsubstantiated rumor... but I do hope it's true!!