A thousand words

With all the interest in PunBB 1.3 of late, I decided to capture some screen shots of a default install and put them up for all to see.

Went round and round for a few days deciding on how to go about doing it. I wanted to present the user with as clean an interface as possible, the screen shot taking precedence above all.

The tools used:

  • Pearl Crescent Page Saver is an extension for Mozilla Firefox that lets you capture images of web pages (thanks to Rickard for recommending this).

  • XnView is an efficient multimedia viewer, browser and converter.

  • XAMPP Lite is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.

The process:

  1. Installed the latest PunBB 1.3 SVN on my local server.
  2. Configured the default install and added some content for the showcase.
  3. Set my Firefox browser width to 950 pixels, best size for viewing the full size images at 1024.
  4. Used the page saver extension to save off the screens in png format.
  5. Used Xnview to massage the file names, under scores for blanks - the dreaded %20 in the URL.
  6. Used Xnview to create the web page, modified one of it’s stock web templates.

Now that I’ve got the hang of it, creating a new set of shots takes just minutes, should SVN changes warrant a new set.

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