Themes/Skins

[Buster's Uncle]

-Actually, I'm trying to get Kil to take care of the art chore himself.  I did tell him no Pokémon.

Really, I did.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm at the stage where I'm cycling back through previously-altered themes, working a little on stuff I've learned to do in the interim, mostly tightening up the top spacing better.  That matters for maximal functionality.

There's room to take out around the menu in Lazy Summer, I think I'll have a look at replacing the optional balloons from Happy New year that I turned into Winter with Christmas images, and I don't know what to do about Gone Fishin, which can't tighten up very much and leave the sunset showing up top - but the menu is in buttons that make the top layout a sloppy mess.  I think I'll have to get rid of those buttons.  It's mostly only a keeper because Rusty likes it.

I don't know that we need Halloween and Thanksgiving, both -I'd like to have a theme for each season of the year, and either would serve for Autumn, but they bring very different things to the table for looks and environment to browse in- and other than that, I don't really see where any of the rest come off redundant.

Anyone have any thoughts about that?  The ones that people are actually using have precedence, of course, and the two Alpha Centauri themes are doing very well.

[DrazharLn]

Glad that page loads are fast for you, too. They're good here, now that I've sorted the local connection. Much better than they've been for a while.

Regarding the other themes, I don't know what to do artistically or design wise. I do think it would be a better idea from a technical point of view to get one theme working well from a performance and UX point of view and then vary it with CSS and possibly UI images only. I believe that this will be easier to maintain and produce better results in the long term.

It is quite possible to produce very different appearances using only CSS, see CSS Zen Garden:

http://www.csszengarden.com/215/
http://www.csszengarden.com/221/

It would be nice to start from scratch with very simple templates and themes, but it's too much work for the moment for me to do and requires someone who knows what they're doing.

A good compromise would be to make a copy of the default SMF2 theme (Curve) or, better, to install an attractive and modern theme like Redsy or Fastline (available to demo here: http://demo.smftricks.com/ login as demo user if you like user: demo, pass: demo).

The downside with these modern themes is that some of our more retro smileys and webdesign don't fit as well. They also don't look good with PortaMX (one of pour addons), but PMX is, in my humble opinion, something we should get rid of anyway*.

The upside is much improved html/template.php and css defaults (so easier to modify and make new/variant themes), responsive design (looks good on big screens, smartphones, etc), better performance, and replaces some of the stuff we currently have coming through from clunky addons.

* Digression on the topic of PortaMx (pmx):

PMX is the kind of addon that makes this forum hard to manage. PMX does a lot of things in a lot of different areas: it generates handles the sidebar on the right, the front page and some other custom pages. This is a problem because: 1) it's trying to do too much stuff, so management settings are split conceptually between SMF and PMX, 2) it's just not very good.

What PortaMX does can and should be done better by different tools. The custom pages would mostly be better on the wiki or as separate, static pages and the front page should either be a custom job in PHP or be from an SMF portal type thing (like portaMX). The little sidebars should be handled by the SMF themes and, where necessary, by less intrusive mods.

[Buster's Uncle]

...An admin interface where I could FIND what I'm looking for would be a very, very, good thing.  I suppose you could try stripping out the PortaMx from your test mirror site and replace what functions you can would be the best way to get sisko's interest/approval...

Redsy does not impress, but I suppose I can fix up that space-hog layout easily enough - it's the custom crap added to themes that gives me fits.

[DrazharLn]

The idea is that it should be fairly easy to modify to our purposes because it produces much simpler html and its css isn't crazy.

I haven't looked into it properly yet, to confirm that it is all sensible, but on a first pass Redsy seems like a decent base.

We can revisit this when I finish moving across the extensions to the test server, I guess.

[Buster's Uncle]

...I do have most of the ones installed tweaked up to my satisfaction, or close, which I've been working on for weeks, so I'm not enthusiastic about the idea of throwing all that out at THIS late date.  -Also, I got into this in the first place to cut the theme clutter down to ten that work, and I'm already going to be thwarted in that, so I take a rather dim view of adding any unless you wizard up something that will update at least all the new ones at once when I have to upload new -oh, thread icons or Shop Items- so something to keep in mind.  It's currently about a 20 minute job to add a new Shop icon and have it show in all themes...

[DrazharLn]

I appreciate that you've been doing a lot on the themes. If they are as you'd like and you don't think you need to make any big changes to it, then there's not a big reason to go this other route.

I've been suggesting this other approach as a way to reduce the maintenance burden of e.g. getting shop icons to appear in more themes and the development burden of customising the themes. The design ideas, but not the particular css could be transferred to this new system, but some changes will probably require more css understanding than you'll care to acquire

OTOH, it's work for me and that time is probably best spent on other things if you're happy with how it is now.

[Buster's Uncle]

I guess I am.  I'm more interested in good tech performance - managing 13 or so themes will not break me.

[Buster's Uncle]

SOMEbody put some serious work in on Lazy Summer today:

  And Buncle did Grin and say: "Take heart, my pathetic innerwebs nerdz minions; for Mighty Draz, He of the Virgin Slaves and the Power Most Max, has smiled upon your whining and Made Things Right.  For Lo, the pagetop menu is most assuredly short now and the breadcrumbs that do lead you home hath not any of that Community » Community » crap no mo'."

  Selah amen.

[DrazharLn]

I freed all the slaves years ago in a fit of republicanism, regrettably.

Happy to help and glad you've got another theme looking OK for you.

[Buster's Uncle]

They were still virgins.

[DrazharLn]

Of course! I was still very young at the time.

Edit: Anyway, I'd rather not revisit my juvenile past. It's bad enough that I haven't gone back and deleted that thread.

[Buster's Uncle]

Holy CRAP, man; you fixed the menu in Gone Fishin to one line with your menu shortening.

[DrazharLn]

 

[Valka]

...This theme doesn't display Shop inventory -not uncommon, and Valka considers that a serious matter in any theme- or member EC in the postbit.  Both are unacceptable in a default theme, and I haven't the foggiest about where to even begin to look into for fixing...

Hey, when people give me stuff, I like to be able to look at it.