New Masonry Grid Thumbnail Style

Today we are moving to a slightly different format for the main thumbnail views on NPN, most will not notice the change, but for the power users it might raise some eyebrows :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Here are the reasons for the change:

  1. The biggest problem with the old layout was an issue where images would stack on top of each other if you scrolled a few pages in, then you couldn’t see the thumbnails for older images.
  2. The new layout is cleaner and faster.
  3. The old layout will not be supported forever so we needed to move to the new layout now to avoid problems in the future.

What’s changed?
I have highlighted what has been removed from the old style in the image below. The label for editors picks is gone (hoping to bring this back soon), there are fewer EP images shown, but they are bigger and rotate in new imagess each time you visit a page. The user avatars for people that have replied are gone, now it only shows the topic creator’s avatar, which helps take away the popularity aspect. Along with views and replies being hidden, and no these cannot be brought back, it’s a limitation.

Here’s what the new view looks like for comparision:

This is the new default for most themes, if you want to bring the old view back I have created a new theme called ‘Classic Style’ that you can find in the hamburger menu, it is based off of the old ‘Dark - Clean’ theme. Just keep in mind that this may not work forever!

Known Limitations:
Currently, the EP icons do not show in their respective categories, only on the latest page and we hope to have this fixed soon. For now, you can always select the editors-pick tag from the dropdown in the category.

It’s not perfect, but we have to keep evolving the site to ensure speed and compatibility for everyone, thank you for understanding and I hope overall you like the change!

4 Likes

I like it, I think it has a nice clean look to it.

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Is it possible to see the number of responses without clicking on the post? Sometimes I like to go into posts that don’t have much, if any action. Sometimes I also avoid posts that have a ton of comments as many voices have already been heard. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise and will get me into some of them!

2 Likes

Admin view looks like this on my Windows/Chrome combo notebook -

Switching to dark-clean put it back to the new set up.

No, I’m afraid this is a limitation of new layout, but as you said this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as you won’t make decisions based upon this! If you’re looking for topics without replies there is always the ‘No Replies’ button:

Thanks Kristen, the admin view is really just for my usage when debugging the site, if you refresh that option should be gone now.

This is great, David. Thank you for working so hard to improve this wonderful site. :+1: :+1:

1 Like

I just hope they keep the classic ‘classic’ theme selector indefinitely and at least give members a choice.