Serendipity Forums

I came home last night after having spent much of last week coding up a dummy page for a job interview... By some very strange reason I just couldn't stop, so I put together a new theme for my site.

It doesnt show properly in Internet Exploder, because I stand adamant on my right to use png. I've tested it in Win:Firefox and Opera, and Mac:Safari, Opera and Firefox, so it should display properly in proper browsers.

http://www.hastalasiesta.org

-m

Hi Martin

The theme looks great. Are you going to release it for everybody?

The more themes of this quality we have for Serendipity, the more users we'll have too

cheers

Dave Cummins

I really like the change you did to your layout; IMHO it's a perfect redesign for the people who knew your page. It's alike, but visually different.

I really dig the blue gradients and that spread eagle.

However, some critique: I don't like the "slashed" background. It's really small and with harsh contrast, which hurts my eye and creates an ugly moiree pattern.

Hope your job interview went well! )

Best regards,
Garvin

David: I'll have to see about releasing this. IT's currently full of hacks workarounds and poorly written CSS, so I'm not feeling very comfortable just dropping it out of my hands yet. What I might do is clean up the code of my previous design (which didn't need quite as much hacking) and release that.
I don't even know what this looks like with a second sidebar. Very personal coding if you get my drift.

Garvin: Thanks a bunch. In fact the slashed background was the starting idea here, but as they say "kill your darlings". I'll have a rethink and see if I still wanna hang on to it.

Oh... And the job-interview? The dude just called and offered me the job.

-m

I have to say that you always have one of the most unique sites around and I always love it. This may be one of the most original ones I think I've seen. Nice work. Please do release you previous design when you get the time.

Martin that is a very sweet theme. Love the separation between main column and sidebar, and I think the eagle and shield really sets the whole thing off nicely. As Dave (d_cee) said, if you could release this or something similar it would be fantastic.

Carl

Well. I'm very thankful for the great feedback. As I've said the theme is actually very ugly from a coding point of view, so I don't feel comfortable releasing it as is. However, as I'd like to contribue to this great software I'll commit to the following: As soon as I've cleared a few "to do"s from my calendar I'll start cleaning up some code and present the community with something that at least resembles this theme.

The reason I'm doing it this way is that the theme is in fact not good enough to distribute as is. Seeing how I've coded it for my special needs, anyone else using this theme would experience:

• *Not being able to use the second sidebar as that would break the theme.
  *Not being able to choose which sidebar to use. Again that would break the theme into ugliness.
  * Being stuck with a fixed sidebar and content width.
  *Hacks in most template files to replace generic content with specific. Such as the banner.

Of course if anyone wants to fiddle around with the code and make this theme more universally digestable I'm very much open for sending them a zipped archive of the theme to mess about in, and I'd also be willing to try and write up a list of the files I've been messing about in to make the theme look the way it does.

It might be that I'm being overly dramatic about code purity, but I'm thinking that the themes available for S9Y should be properly coded and that any destructive coding should ideally only happen in the hands of the users... No?

-m[/list]

Martin, your dedication to Serendipity, and in particular to ensuring that only fully complete themes are released is an excellent philosophy. I just wish I had done the same thing with my first few themes.

Also, the offer to send a zipfile of your template to another designer is very generous, and mayI say that considering your theme has already been started, and just needs to be completed, that this would be an excellent project for a new designer who wants to really get their hands dirty with Serendipity code.

I would actually love to see what some of the members currently asking questions in the themes forum could do with your template, in particular, people like davecjr, hokey, lordcoffee, costa, Owen Stubbs, toves etc. I'm sure the rest of us would provide any support they need.

Cheers

Carl

Hi Martin

I agree with Carl. You've done the groundwork with the theme so why not let one of the very talented 'new' designers have a go.

If anybody does take it on, then Carl has put a piece of code on his site to position one sidebar under the other that is really useful for 1 column fixed width themes. I'm sure he'll post a link here for anyone who needs it.

Dave

2 column theme information is here, Dave thanks for reminding me.