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XHTML theme Dream City ported to Serendipity

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 7:08 am
by carl_galloway
Image
Dream City is an XHTML template from Open Designs that has now been ported to Serendipity. You can download the zipfile from my Dream City post.

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 12:41 pm
by sonichouse
Wow, that was quick. I will have a look at this tonight when i get back from the office.

Thanks, Steve

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 12:59 pm
by carl_galloway
It doesn't take long to port a basic template, this particular theme took a little longer because it has some odd little things in it that needed to be thought about. I'm sure people who use this template will have many things they'll want to change, but I'll wait for comments before I do any more on it.

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 2:55 pm
by judebert
Whoa. Does that weird/neat sidebar stacking/indentation thing work for any number of sidebar items, or only for three?

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 2:56 pm
by judebert
Never mind; I'm an idiot. I need to read the entire post before I respond.

Very neat stuff!

Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2008 3:43 pm
by carl_galloway
It's all thanks to Garvin and that nifty code that lets you create extra navbars. I just named each of the three parts differently so users can still drag sidebar items to whichever part they want to use.

But now you've got me all nervous, I forgot to see what would happen if a user doesn't have any sidebars.

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 10:16 am
by garvinhicking
Hi!

Yay, love that theme. It looks very unique. I'm really stumbed to see you so active again, Carl. I don't even dare to thank you because I don't want to scare you off !;-) ;-)

We have long not added new themes ported by YellowLED or you to Spartacus. Might it be worth the effort to check which themes should be incoroporated there, if Carl, YellowLED and the possible other contributers agree to add their work there?

Best regards,
Garvin

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 10:35 am
by carl_galloway
Garvin I'm working on another theme right now, Nautica05, which is also an XHTML theme. I hope to release it next week.

Spartacus really needs to be updated, after all it is where most of the users will hope to find templates. If you think any template I do is worth adding to Spartacus then please do, no need to ask.

Themes have a lot of different of options now so making a test site that let's people see the different themes working is not easy, but I wonder if we could somehow standardize some items like the navbar? At the moment if a user switches from one theme to another they lose any navbar links they've put in, and most themes only have the link and the anchor text, so it should be possible to preserve these from theme to theme. What do you think, could this be implemented somehow?

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 12:02 pm
by sonichouse
carl_galloway wrote:Themes have a lot of different of options now so making a test site that let's people see the different themes working is not easy, but I wonder if we could somehow standardize some items like the navbar? At the moment if a user switches from one theme to another they lose any navbar links they've put in, and most themes only have the link and the anchor text, so it should be possible to preserve these from theme to theme. What do you think, could this be implemented somehow?
I think making the navlinks a common property across all templates would be a killer feature. Although I tend not to switch themes regularly it is a pain to copy them to notepad, and then paste them into each new template.

Would there be any impact on the older themes ?

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 12:20 pm
by yellowled
carl_galloway wrote:Spartacus really needs to be updated, after all it is where most of the users will hope to find templates. If you think any template I do is worth adding to Spartacus then please do, no need to ask.
I agree, and I'd be happy to have some of my ports put on Spartacus. But I also see a need to clean it out a little.

I realize there's a need to keep old templates available, but there's also a need to keep the themes section in Spartacus tidy. Maybe we should have something like a "themes vault" or something to store all s9y templates and just keep the up-to-date ones in Spartacus ...

YL

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 1:56 pm
by garvinhicking
Hi!

Making the options available in other templates is really hazardous.

The reason is that the options are saved in the database, associated with the name of the template they apply to. If that were changed, a template would never be able to figure out if a template option applies to itself, or to another template. Also, switching templates would maybe overwrite the options of the old template.

Plus, having different template options for different categories would no longer be possible.

Technically, a template itself could first fetch its own template options, and later query for all template options, but that would put a lot of PHP code stress to a template. Sooo...even though it's very nice from a user's standpoint, technically this is really dangerous, because it could also screw up any template that accidentaly declared the same template option name but handles values differently...

Maybe a different approach could be better, like a menu item "Import template settings from Category [XXX]", so that a user could simply import it. Technically that's just a INSERT INTO options (...) SELECT (...) FROM options where template = 'OLD'. But creating the interface to that is more work, it could be done, maybe this is a cool thing for the Judebert+Don-Supercombo? :-D
I agree, and I'd be happy to have some of my ports put on Spartacus. But I also see a need to clean it out a little.
Maybe some people could volunteer and create a list of cool templates and which ones to sort out? I could commit all the necessary files, but I don't have the time nor knowledge to sort out good templates and bad ones. I like most of them :D

Regards,
Garvin

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 3:17 pm
by judebert
Anything that starts with "MT" or "WP" should be moved to the archive. Especially if it's a bunch of different colorsets of the same theme.

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 3:46 pm
by carl_galloway
I've always been a big fan of taking the legacy templates, updating them to work with the new config screen, and merging colorsets into a single theme. My last few themes have removed backwards compatibility and I know this is an issue for Garvin, but even so it would tidy up the older themes and remove some of the clutter.

Speaking of backwards compatibility, do we know how many users are still running versions of Serendipity pre1.1?

Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2008 3:54 pm
by Don Chambers
A long time ago, I proposed the idea of making navlinks a template-independent concept... since that time, however, I have come to realize that it may not be all that desireable... for a lot of reasons. Importing sounds like a nifty idea, but I would be concerned about that trying to be an apples to oranges proposition - ie, there is no guarantee that one template handles navigation the same as another.

Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 6:18 am
by azel
Likin' the ports, Carl. It would be great if someone would port Dark Ritual. I would totally try to do it myself if I wasn't such a code moron.

And now that I have a baby I have even less time to do anything, much less learn any coding lol.