Themes and Templates

Re: How can I do to create theme!

• 2008/2/13 5:54:16
• davidl2

I agree with you that sticking with one standard is not for everyone... I like both some of your own themes - and some of Kris's and Snows designs... and I think all techniques have their merits.

Would it be possible to adapt your tutorial on your site, to include on the Impress Wiki at all? At least this would provide some people with something to work from....

I think you're right about the theme the original poster was discussing being from another system... and they all have their own unique coding/design methods...

Re: How can I do to create theme!

• 2008/2/13 4:39:42
• Will

Documenting theme making is not exactly an easy process. It would be hard to fully document it without offending one of the wings.

You have designers like snow that base all their work on Morph, and designers like myself that will not work with it. Within a cms community, attempting to define some sort of "standard" to art, will alienate our half of the spectrum. Likewise, developers like snow deserve to develop the way they choose.

So how do you present a descriptive theme wiki without alienating either half? without showing preference to one side or the other? This is exactly what XOOPS did, when creating their "design team".

How a developer builds their work is their decision, and trying to force feed make believe standards to them is not a good idea. I will point you to look at the theme contest on whoops. Whole lotta participants there. I doubt there will be, except for perhaps the team leaders posse. (Only 5 days left until the funniest **** ever!).

You should ensure compliance, but hyping one way or the other will surely cost the community.

__
That being said, please link us to the theme you are talking about.

It sounds like he is looking at another cms's theme. (evo maybe).

Re: How can I do to create theme!

• 2008/2/13 4:02:14
• davidl2

Actually - with the exception of the "xoops.css" file - there should be no issues in backwards compatibility (unless you are using a theme for xoops 2.2)... and if anyone has got a theme that wont work.... that doesn't require core hacks... then we'd love to see this - so we can deal with it.

Basically the themes will be compatible - with the exception of adding additional block locations from the backend for some ImpressCMS specific themes... (not difficult )

Re: How can I do to create theme!

• 2008/2/13 1:35:29
• Shine

Link doesn't work anymore.

Then again, I also would like to know if there are differences between impresscms and xoops themes and CSS.
Does impresscms have more/other css id's etc. which differ from xoops?

Now it looks like creating a theme for impresscms is difficult, specially when I read the difficulties considering the standard provided impresscms theme.

No offence but I really think at this aspect needs something to be done. AFter all, the theme is an important presentation for the cms. It is a pitty I am no designer at all.
Do we have some designers in tha house who can help out a.s.a.p ?

Grtz., Shine

Re: Impresstheme

• 2008/2/12 5:25:32
• sato-san

We need the help of Snow.

Re: Impresstheme

• 2008/2/12 4:44:11
• skenow

Rene - put all the blocks in the same position (center) and you will see why it was changed.

We need the designers to go over this again and fix for both situations.

Re: Impresstheme

• 2008/2/12 4:34:06
• sato-san

Why do you have in revision 795 changed? Have you seen your result?

And now?

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/2/4 5:15:42
• Will

Well, we can expect our next browser releases sometime in the third quarter of the year.

FF3 is in beta, and you can get it now... and its wonderful might I add.

IE8 is of course being hidden by MS, and they say 24 months. So 6 years from now when they actually release it... maybe it will fully support css2, but by then we will be using telepathy to transfer data so... yeah.

They seem to be paying a lot of attention to web standards this go around, and their model hasn't significantly changed like it did from IE6 to IE7. As well as the introduction of a new meta mode. IE8 might be fun to use on my 80th birthday.

Its going to be an interesting few years with browsers. With mozilla doing a major release every year, and IE actually paying attention to webstandards.org and w3c.

All I know is that they allege that IE8 has already passed the acid2 test. Where neither my ff2 or my ff3b pass it. Then again, the test is to see if the browser can handle bad css... only IE would bloat about being able to digest bad css.

Anywho, yeah... passing style variables through smarty would be cool. Sublime and I were working on a module to handle it a while back, but I guess we saw something shiny and got distracted. Though it would have been php. Simple to do it as a module. with a little call to the database to retrieve user defined hex values, then pass them onto the stylesheet. it really is just a matter of wrapping php around a skeletal css file, and writing to it with the customizable classes / divs / tds / tables .. blah blah blah on submit.

Atleast that was the way I had planned to do it.

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/2/4 1:31:35
• nachenko

Thanks MrTheme.

Working on a Drupal site I found a solution that adds some overhead, but just a bunch of lines.

I still miss the possibility of defining variables in CSS, for colors and such. Search & replace works fine, but it's still a pain in the ass.

I know this is something that should be added in next version of CSS, and properly supported by browsers, but we all know Internet Explorer is still unable to support many CSS2 items, and Firefox 2 still have some bugs too.

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/2/3 20:45:16
• Will

Considered alternating styles?

I released a few themes for whOOPS that do this.

http://www.xoops.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3627
http://www.xoops.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3624

The way I incorporated them then was cheesy as hell, but it does exactly what you wanna do...


Even stores the users choice to a cookie.

My site is closed down while I make the switch to impress, so here are the direct downloads for these two themes.

http://www.dnagamer.com/xoops/halo.zip
http://www.dnagamer.com/xoops/MrT_Colors.zip

Both use the alternating styles functionality. Be sure to pay close attention to the <a> tags as that is where the magic happens.

As far as browser sniffing is concerned it is heavily frowned upon. However you can use conditional statements to knock out pretty much every engine.

Re: Impresstheme

• 2008/2/3 11:08:31
• skenow

Just committed in both themes - revision 795

Re: Impresstheme

• 2008/2/3 4:26:10
• marcan

Anyone has committed this in impresscms_1.0 for the next RC release ?

Re: Impresstheme

• 2008/2/2 9:44:55
• buddy

Thanks, Steve!

Buddy

Re: Impresstheme

• 2008/2/2 8:59:52
• skenow

In themes/impresstheme/css/style.css, remove the float:right; from #xo-page .xo-block {} definition, around line 53

Impresstheme

• 2008/2/2 8:30:31
• buddy

I downloaded the beta 2 last night night. I wanted to see what the impresstheme looked like and all I have done to it is change the picture. I have it as a theme that can be selected on the left side of my site. The blocks at the bottom don't look correct on the front page. I guess it could be my monitor but all the other thems look ok. Could someone please look at it here?

Thanks,
Buddy

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/1/22 13:32:26
• Dave_L

As you may know, Smarty has its own support forum at http://smarty.net/

I did a quick search, and couldn't find anything. But the Smarty gurus there might know a better way of doing this.

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/1/22 10:58:09
• nekro

Really very nice ideas... please nachenko... go on... it will be great to have something like this...

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/1/22 6:57:54
• nachenko

As a proof of concept i'd say, yes, this is the idea. The problem with that is that the CSS file is included into the main HTML file, which results in a larger HTL file and unability to cache the style sheet.

BTW, I'm negociating a new site for a new customer. Accesibility of the site must be certified. It's a great opportunity to push this concept, as a Smarty driven color scheme would allow disabled people to choose a special color squeme that improves readability.

Perhaps we could even detect the browser and change automatically to this optimized-for-disabled-people theme design when browser is blah-blah-blah... Instead of having two different CSS style sheets, we define some variables for colors and edit just this.

I'll think about it.

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/1/22 6:21:55
• marcan

I believe I have something:

http://smartfactory.ca/smarty_css/

For now, the idea is just to output a smarty template between "style" tags:

And the content of smarty_css_styles.html is:


Now, this is not the most elegant, but it's a proof of concept, ans it works .

And then we can think of a better way to do this. Perhaps, we could create a new method in the xos_opal_Theme class, something like xos_opal_Theme::addStylesheet() but where we would pass smarty template file holding the CSS definitions. This new method would still then output a "style" tag containing the "smartified" CSS definitions, but within the "head" section of the source, which is acceptable.

Thoughts ?

Re: Can Smarty parse a CSS file?

• 2008/1/22 4:35:27
• davidl2

Would be a very nice feature if possible.