Brainstorming: What do we "need" template-wise?

Skinning and designing Serendipity (CSS, HTML, Smarty)
d_cee
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Post by d_cee »

looks great on a mac!

I'll look forward to seeing how it holds together with all the Serendipity stuff in it :-)

Dave
carl_galloway
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Post by carl_galloway »

@yellowled, I haven't looked all that hard into your sourcecode, but it seems similar to the code used in bex02 and andreas09, have you compared them to see if those bugs can be resolved?

Also, I have many unfinished templates, but I've been moving in other directions and whilst I have some ideas for vanilla templates they're still too raw compared to your demo.

The big test of the 'bulletproof' layout would be backporting a couple of the more popular templates such as coffee cup or andreas08 into your codebase and test it for breakages.
yellowled
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Post by yellowled »

carl_galloway wrote:@yellowled, I haven't looked all that hard into your sourcecode, but it seems similar to the code used in bex02 and andreas09, have you compared them to see if those bugs can be resolved?
Nope, I haven't - and I can't until I'm back at home in a few hours. It's basically the code I used for the yl15-Template.
carl_galloway wrote:Also, I have many unfinished templates, but I've been moving in other directions and whilst I have some ideas for vanilla templates they're still too raw compared to your demo.
I'm still not sure how unbreakable this is once images and more floats are involved. However, I have just now commited all three pages to browsershots.org, in about 4-24 hours we should have results. Plus, I have checked it at home under Windows, and it looks pretty good even in the earlier IEs ...
carl_galloway wrote:The big test of the 'bulletproof' layout would be backporting a couple of the more popular templates such as coffee cup or andreas08 into your codebase and test it for breakages.
I'd prefer to turn this into a working s9y template first, which I can probably do before the weekend. I'll keep you guys posted.

YL
carl_galloway
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Post by carl_galloway »

the yl-15 template seems pretty solid so this could be a good layout to use as the base, from a support point of view, do you think those problems can be resolved? I'd hate to swap one set of 'how do I' questions for another set that are just as repetitive.

At the moment I have ff2, ff1.5, ie6, ie7 on two windows machines but from next week this might not be the case, do you want me to test anything while I have the chance?
yellowled
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Post by yellowled »

carl_galloway wrote:the yl-15 template seems pretty solid so this could be a good layout to use as the base, from a support point of view, do you think those problems can be resolved?
Which problems?
carl_galloway wrote:At the moment I have ff2, ff1.5, ie6, ie7 on two windows machines but from next week this might not be the case, do you want me to test anything while I have the chance?
Go ahead, but as I said I have commited all example pages to browsershots.org, and the results look very good:
3 columns
2 columns, sidebar on the right side
2 columns, sidebar on the left side

In the meantime, I have put this into a s9y template, which right now has just some basic styles needed to make it work (no colors). It's just index.tpl, style.css and config.inc.php for the time being. Right now, I've already included template options for the position of the navbar (none, above the header, below the header) plus Garvins code for customizing the navbar (number of links, URL, title). Also, the layout can be switched from the theme configurator (3 cols, 2 cols/sidebar left, 2 cols/sidebar right; in the latter two cases, both sidebars are printed into the single one).

http://www.yellowled.de/tmp/bulletproof/bulletproof.zip

I was thinking of setting up a test blog for this in my webspace, but I probably won't have the time to do it this weekend, so maybe you guys could check this out. I have only tested this in FF1.5 and Opera 9, both under Linux.

YL
d_cee
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Post by d_cee »

Hi YL

I've checked this out in FF1.5, FF2 and Safari on the mac and it looks fine.
Nice work!

Dave
yellowled
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Post by yellowled »

d_cee wrote:I've checked this out in FF1.5, FF2 and Safari on the mac and it looks fine.
Makes me rethink my "Mac sucks" attitude :wink:
d_cee wrote:Nice work!
Thanks, Dave - but let's hold out breath for a while. This is still very basic (actually, it's not much more than a XHTML layout from a book ported to s9y), and I really want to do this step by step.

There's a very slim chance I might find time tomorrow night to setup a temporary test blog in my webspace which will only be used for developing and testing this baby. If not, I can probably do that on Monday.

In the meantime, let's think about what else we want to be able to configure in the template options and how to do that. navbar is already implemented, we still need a way to change the header image, the basic colors, and the entry footer, which is probably the easiest thing to do. But what exacly do we want to offer for the entry footer? Something like:

- full footer (basically the way it is now in the default template)
- slim footer (no comments/trackback info; nice feature for the s9y-as-a-cms guys)
- split footer (I have working code for that; this basically means to split it up into an "author byline" which is display below the entry title and a second footer holding comments, trackbacks and stuff; might be nice for multi-user blogs)

sounds good for me ..?

But how do we (easily) change the basic colors and header image from the template config?

YL
Don Chambers
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Post by Don Chambers »

YellowLed wrote:But how do we (easily) change the basic colors and header image from the template config?
YL
I'm no expert, but could not the theme author provide multiple style sheets each of which uses a different color scheme then have s9y offer a drop down box showing each of the stylesheet.css file names that exist in that theme's directory?

I probably should not be commenting on this thread since I have yet to upgrade to the latest s9y with all the fancy new template options. :oops:
=Don=
yellowled
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Post by yellowled »

Owen Stubbs wrote:
YellowLed wrote:But how do we (easily) change the basic colors and header image from the template config?
YL
I'm no expert, but could not the theme author provide multiple style sheets each of which uses a different color scheme then have s9y offer a drop down box showing each of the stylesheet.css file names that exist in that theme's directory?
That is of course a possibility. In fact, this is already possible in v1.1-templates using colorsets. But it's not exactly what I would like to see :)

Imagine you have a template you really like, it's just that you'd like i.e. the header to have a different background color (which is a very common forum question), and you could simply enter a color hex value in the theme configurator and - boom! - the template looks exactly the way you want it to look without having to edit any files you know nothing about ...

I don't know if it's technically possible, but it would be great if it was ...

YL
d_cee
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Post by d_cee »

Hi YL
we still need a way to change the header image, the basic colors,
I seem to remember Carl and Garvin doing some work with a colourwheel. I don't know how it ended up although I seem to recall some difficulties. I'm sure Carl will recall.
and the entry footer, which is probably the easiest thing to do. But what exacly do we want to offer for the entry footer? Something like:

- full footer (basically the way it is now in the default template)
- slim footer (no comments/trackback info; nice feature for the s9y-as-a-cms guys)
- split footer (I have working code for that; this basically means to split it up into an "author byline" which is display below the entry title and a second footer holding comments, trackbacks and stuff; might be nice for multi-user blogs)
Sounds ideal.

Dave
cyrano
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Post by cyrano »

hi all,

trying a bit in changing css files for default theme and hope to show after the weekend some first results.

one question:
need some changes for plugins entries, do i change the css in the plugins directory for each plugin?
or, when there is no i have to write some class definitions and add them to the main theme css?

greetings
cyrano
regards cyrano
-------------------------
www.planepix.de
www.weitzelmedia.de
carl_galloway
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Post by carl_galloway »

Generally you would copy those styles into your template stylesheet. The better coded plugins tend to check if your stylesheet includes one of the stylenames used in the plugin stylesheet. You will probably need to look into the plugin php file to see which stylename is looked for.
carl_galloway
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Post by carl_galloway »

@yellowled, I finally found some time to look at your bulletproof template, very nice, I like it a lot, and I can see myself using that codebase for a lot of future templates. Very very well done. You mentioned in previous post that if the content was shorter than the sidebars you were having problems, is this still a problem?
yellowled
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Post by yellowled »

carl_galloway wrote:I finally found some time to look at your bulletproof template, very nice, I like it a lot, and I can see myself using that codebase for a lot of future templates. Very very well done.
Too kind, as usual :) I'm pretty positive that this will really live up to it's (temporary) name, since I've been using basically the same code in my blog for quite some time now, plus Robert has been using it, too, as far as I know also without problems. Let's see what happens once we stack up the actual code with more .tpl files and CSS.
carl_galloway wrote:You mentioned in previous post that if the content was shorter than the sidebars you were having problems, is this still a problem?
Yes, if the sidebars have a different background-color than the content. Not really a problem, more like ill-favoured. I don't want to use sliding faux columns (i.e. background images) for colored sidebars. This template has a wrapper div, so we can assign the same bg color to the wrapper and the sidebars to reach the same effect. However, if the content is shorter and has a different bg color, it will have the color of the wrapper/sidebars at the bottom. Doesn't look great, but I'm pretty positive this won't happen too often in a blog.

Basically this means if you have maaany sidebar plugins, choose a high number of entries to be displayed on any page :)

YL
carl_galloway
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Post by carl_galloway »

Yes, if the sidebars have a different background-color than the content. Not really a problem, more like ill-favoured. I don't want to use sliding faux columns (i.e. background images) for colored sidebars. This template has a wrapper div, so we can assign the same bg color to the wrapper and the sidebars to reach the same effect. However, if the content is shorter and has a different bg color, it will have the color of the wrapper/sidebars at the bottom. Doesn't look great, but I'm pretty positive this won't happen too often in a blog.
Ah, that old problem, there are other ways of styling the content pane so that this isn't really a problem, and if a user particularly wants this ability they could always copy your code into one of the tables based templates.
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