Hi, will answer respectively.
1) I really liked the design itself, and honestly if you've seen my previous works (Maple designs and websites) you'd know how much of a fan I am, of the old styles, and I'm definitely not talking about the bland-ish old school designs, I'm talking about the good ones, unique, that stands out. I'm not one to go with Trends, imho making Hipster-ish "modern" designs for MS websites is a total meh, but oh well that's just my own taste and preferences.
2) As much as I don't like calling out, you're pretty wrong here. First of all, nesting CSS has zero impact on performance, literally zero. If by any chance it was done on a
repetitive massive level (i.e. 10 levels or more, 20-30 times in the DOM or more, at the very least), then you might see a small performance loss in the browser (assuming you're on a
PC and
not Mobile).
The example given is only 3 levels deep, not counting the parent class of course. Mind you, this is LESS, not traditional CSS. LESS emphasizes code readability and maintainability, not superior performance over pure CSS (which is currently not possible, obviously) and btw it transforms into pure CSS after "compilation" (if you can even regard
LESS->CSS as a compilation). I never go beyond 4 levels deep, it becomes unreadable and overall annoying.
3) Most of the elements are either set as relative, or default (as in, not set at all). The example given in the screenshots is of the Status widget, where the colored Bar is supposed to fill the inside of the container, as per the percentage set in the height, which makes total sense in this particular case. Overall I refrain from setting elements as Absolutely-positioned, it's a bad practice mostly, unless a use-case such as the Status widget is presented, where there's no better/preferred way of doing it.
As far as Mobile support goes, this specific theme will not be modified to be compatible with Mobile device, instead - a separate responsive theme will be presented to Mobile users by default. This will eliminate the need of making every single theme compatible with mobile devices, especially when most themes that will be released with this CMS will be as Old-School as could be, therefore absolutely incompatible with Mobile devices.
4) As mentioned previously, I really really REALLY hate JavaScript, in any and all forms. On-top of that I really don't see the point of pushing front-end frameworks in any Web App. It's good for certain cases, not all. I don't see the advantages it gives over not using a framework in this project. Now say I go with Vue, or React, or Angular (remember what happened with the first Angular..?), that would mean keeping it up-to-date with the framework itself, it would mean forcing everyone who wishes to use this CMS, to learn something they might not be interested in, also might deter them from using this CMS.
Don't forget - by going with a front-end framework, I'm basically turning a rather simplistic process of setting this CMS up, into a nightmare. Because then you wont only need LAMP(prod)/WAMP(dev) stack, you will also need NPM and more technologies and softwares, as well as dependencies to run. I might as well quit this project now instead LOL
Yes, jQuery is old, yes it doesn't have good rep in this day and age, but it gets the job done with minimal work. Especially when all I use it for is simple DOM manipulations and Animations, which isn't bad at all. Trust me when I say this, when the need arise to write actual front-end code (JS), I will definitely do it with pure JS over jQuery or any other third-party library. It's better that way.
Thanks for the input, and of course - wishing me good luck however, how about you join this project? I'm honestly hoping to see Community Effort in this open source project, once it becomes open source.
I honestly can't get my head around this, it's so annoying to see the MU community getting together to produce top-notch emulators and CMS, yet the MSPS community is just full of leechers and trolls who flame all day long. We are, as a community, too busy being toxic to one another, instead of helping each other out, and promoting the Game, as well as getting everyone to get better whether as Persons or Developers. It's sad to see most servers out there are still using 6yrs old CMS that was built the same way, with the same tech and practices as 15yrs old websites. At least there's some progress in the Emulators (Server Files) field, where there's nearly none in the Web.
P.S. If I'm seen as if my comment is insulting, misunderstood or anything, it is not my intention. I'm just tired af as a result of working a full time Physical job (10-12hrs a day). Also my free time is limited to weekends which is more annoying, not having the time to dedicate for this project on the daily-basis.