Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Skinning and designing Serendipity (CSS, HTML, Smarty)
Timbalu
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by Timbalu »

Well, treating someones choice as being an adult means: "giving them a neutral list" at hand. This is what alphabetical or timestamp ASC/DESC sorted list are about, IMHO.
Giving the theme author into hand to call something "recommended" is at least a quite "subjective" view. I think this is what YL was talking about.
If we as Devs give an objection about recommended themes in the forum or in the docs, touched by time, this is something else, though still being subjective too.
Regards,
Ian

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onli
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by onli »

Don Chambers wrote:I *think* I understand why you guys want to do something to differentiate some themes from others.... mostly because there are 1) many older themes and 2) few newer/modern/responsive themes. Perhaps there are other reasons.
That's mainly it for me. We are doing a disservice to our users by not warning them when they build their blog on an outdated not-responsive xhtml theme from 2001. Highlighting better options is a way to prevent that. If that section with better options gets big enough, then the really old themes can be further hidden.
Don Chambers wrote:Is it possible to implement some kind of tagging (responsive, s9y 2.0, backend theme, magazine, etc)?
How about listing themes by either release date or date most recently revised?
I like that idea actually. It is a bigger piece of work though.

First, if we use info.txt and other files more and if we want to have the real data for update times, then we need spartacus to be able to update themes. That is not the case currently.

Then we need to define a selection of tags and attributes (magazine, responsive, html5, imageblog, classical blog, …; recently upgraded?) that themes can have. Those could be saved in the info.txt, recently upgraded could be calculated. We'd need an UI to sort and filter them. If we have all that, then a sound default selection could replace the recommended block.

I don't see myself having the time for that, but I'd be quite happy if someone else wants to tackle this and improve the current solution. I would be able to help.
Don Chambers
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by Don Chambers »

We don't need to have all the answers right away.. I think everyone has good ideas here..

Maybe we just start by coming up with a list of tags. Theme authors could then add those tags to info.txt for now.

Unless anyone feels that ALL themes would need to be tagged with something thereby making the task a bit more time consuming.
=Don=
yellowled
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by yellowled »

Timbalu wrote:Giving the theme author into hand to call something "recommended" is at least a quite "subjective" view. I think this is what YL was talking about.
No, but I can see why one would think that. It is not really our place as devs to tell our users what to do.

I think it does not make any sense to apply labels to themes that will be outdated in the foreseeable future. As Don already stated, at some point all themes will be responsive. Yes, it may take longer for s9y than for other systems. So what?

I am all for removing outdated themes from the core and spartacus. But I have also discussed that topic with Garvin multiple times and know how he feels about removing themes from either one. It reduces choices for users, which are small enough as it is (both the number of choices and the number of users, actually).

So to conclude this, I think that classifying themes in any way, shape or form is pointless. If anyone wants to invest time in that, I obviously can not stop them, but I think that time could be spent better.

YL
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by yellowled »

That being said, I just checked out the current solution in my dev blog. It is completely unobstrusive visually, which I like way better than earlier solutions like adding a ribbon to responsive themes etc.

I may not be convinced that this is a good idea altogether (I don't need to be), but at least this is clean and simple. Again, my only true objection is that I’m sure we'll need to remove it in the foreseeable future.

YL
yellowled
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by yellowled »

yellowled wrote:That being said, I just checked out the current solution in my dev blog.
Just noticed this, not sure if onli is aware of it: it does not work for me with Spartacus themes. Only the themes marked as recommended in the core are actually listed in the recommended section. Might be because Spartacus hasn't synced yet?

YL
onli
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by onli »

I hope so. I wasn't sure whether spartacus fetches the info.txt of spartacus-themes completely, and whether that gets cached indefinitely or not. Wanted to wait one spartacus-cycle and then check on it.
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by yellowled »

onli wrote:I hope so.
Doesn't seem like it. It should’ve updated by now, I have even deleted package_template.xml by hand to “force” it. Still, the recommended additional themes are not listed in “Recommended”.

YL
onli
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by onli »

Okay. I'll make spartacus fetch that information.
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by onli »

Spartacus does not include all info properties in the xml. I now added the recommended tag, https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugi ... d4b2d7653d and https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/comm ... 486a9a8cfe. If it works this should work for spartacus-themes as soon as Garvin switches his script over.
yellowled
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by yellowled »

onli wrote:If it works this should work for spartacus-themes as soon as Garvin switches his script over.
It does.

So that leaves us with the discussion about what should be “recommended”. For example, there is another theme on Spartacus which is responsive (Resy), but it's not set to “recommended”. I think it's okay that it's not since it's a sloppy design (for instance, it does not reset visited link styles, which look very weird) and the author does not seem to be active in the community.

But we should actually come up with some kind of ruleset as to what themes need to have to get a recommendation.

YL
Lux
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by Lux »

yellowled wrote:But we should actually come up with some kind of ruleset as to what themes need to have to get a recommendation.
!!!

Dirk
onli
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by onli »

Yeah. Difficult. I don't think we can have objective rules for something like that (for example: Would my fork of codeschmiede, which is responsive and uses parts of html5, be a good fit for that tag? I'm not so sure). But we could define a process.

We already have the "present theme in the theme-forum" to get it on spartacus. If that theme is a modern theme (html5 + responsive) the designers of the devteam (that'd be you, YL, and Don) can opt to mark it as recommended, if they see no other blockers (like an unfinished design).

Something like that?

Existing themes will be marked based on our judgement.
yellowled
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by yellowled »

onli wrote:Something like that?
IMO it should never depend on one or more specific people's judgement (which is always subjective, also they must be available) but on objective features. Ideally, even “non-designers” should be able to classify a theme as “recommended” by checking these. I don't think we can afford to be too strict, though.
  • HTML5 instead of XHTML – using HTML5 elements would be a bonus, not a must-have
  • Responsive design – shouldn't matter if mobile-first or not, I guess
  • Use of theme options – I would not recommend a theme that still requires me to edit .tpl files to change the nav, for example
  • No obvious bugs or design flaws – see missing :visited styles in Resy
  • Kind of unique – doesn't have to reinvent the wheel, but it should not be a blatant copy of an existing theme
It is hard to come up with objective features to judge quality, though. And frankly, if we want to get to the point where we only ship recommended themes with the core and can actually start to deprecate themes on Spartacus, we can not really afford to be too picky here.

Presenting it in the forum, meh – how else would it get on Spartacus or in the core? I would like to state that the author should be active in the community, but that would kind of exclude first-time theme authors at least potentially. I don't want to do that.

I would make it a requirement that whoever sets the “recommended” flag should have seen a live demo of the theme in question. Never recommend something just by screenshots.

YL
Timbalu
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Re: Sticky Post for responsive Templates?

Post by Timbalu »

I often wonder about these coding quickshots into the dark... Was this ever really tested?
Well, it may always be that my dev repo is slight different - but I didn't get the infos for my backend theme any more (which hit me visually at first) and (after fixing this) had the resting templates array still carry the recommended themes also. I fixed that for myself, but I really wonder why nobody has or saw that too...

I still see the issue being too "subjective" for this "recommendation" section - You get something weighted, but you also get outside a neutral scope. And you need someone to decide this, in special in cases where this isn't obvious or is too much a personal opinion. These sort of changes need a positive willingness from us all to carry it into the future. Are we really at this point? Having a "standard" theme is a recommendation too, but we all agreed on this, and which is different since being the delivered frontdoor. Don't get me wrong, I personally would recommend these themes too, compared to most of these old xhtml ones. But I would recommend this as a personal, subjective action to someone or more generally here in the forum. Hm..
Regards,
Ian

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