Currently, news posts on the portal page are all the same size.

For news posts consisting of 2-3 lines, this causes a huge waste a space, leaving me to watch a page with 3 lines of text, surrounded by huge white boxes.

When a news post doesn't reach the maximum box size, the boxes should shrink.

I think the overall screen economy of IPB2 is somewhat suboptimal.

Problem is that it's difficult to code something like this cleanly -- i.e., without ugly hacks that break certain browsers and don't work right in certain cases.

CSS has a max-width attribute, but I don't know about max-height. That would be an ideal solution if it exists, except that IE doesn't bother to support it (max-width that is, I assume it'd be the case if there is a max-height too).

The remaining solution would be to use javascript (hack) or to do the sizing at the php level dependent upon the number of characters and some fixed or estimated width (ugly).

I could just change it back to the way it used to work, but I like the current solution better for longer news posts.

Edit: Maybe a good compromise would be to just shrink the standard height.

> I think the overall screen economy of IPB2 is somewhat suboptimal.

Have you ABXed this statement? If not, you are in violation of the TOS.

More seriously, I have to agree.

Making entirely new skins for ipb, let alone space optimized ones, is not a small task. I don't really have the time to overhaul the entire skin to make it use less space. If someone would like to design a new skin though and send it to me, I would consider using it.

Nice one, dev0.