Some history - the birth of the sidebar

[live627]

Everyone likes history, so here's a small historical tidbit about the sidebar that'll otherwise be forgotten.

It begins with the drop-down menus that Curve sports.

I frequently miss those important buttons, so I decided to switch to sidebar menus. Big visual mistake! It's just plain ugly: the menu spored a big, blocky header and the actual menu links below the big, blue blocks seemed naked - they had no panel to reside in, the padding was all fouled up. So I reverted, but began to miss the convenience of losing the menu when I moved the mouse too far.

So something was due for a change. I wanted sidebar links, and with some redesigning, I felt at ease using them.

(Oh, and the theme was more similar to Curve back then before I go on)

Then I took the next step. I moved the user info from the top of the page and bolstered it up to my own liking.

And since I've seen some of the new implementations in the SMF fork (one of which is the dynamic RSS block) I added a RSS block to the sidebar.

That was when I decided to apply the theme here, since I didn't want to use the old theme anymore. I noticed my homepage didn't look right with three columns. So I cut that layout in half so to speak. I tweaked the theme to put the new layout on the sidebar.

After that, I expanded more on the portal integration, changing it from a static call to dynamically fetching the acttion and calling a layout based on that.

I decided to add other portal support. Simple portal was easy enough, although not as easy. So much for the name, eh? But it's simple compared to some other portals. I gave up on some and asking the developers about the others.

And so there you have it - history. Software as it appears today will usually have a long history to it, and this theme is no exception.