Posted on: 06/16/04 01:11pm
By: SoundChaser
I have a couple of questions about theme hacking -- one specific to Geeklog's supplied themes, one a bit more general.
(1) I started trying to create a new theme based on the Clean theme. I was originally thinking that it was fairly close to what I wanted to start from -- although looking at it now, it seems that I would probably have been better to start from Classic or Yahoo.
The question is this: are any of the themes more consistent in their usage of CSS? I am noticing that most of the themes seem to be over-riding the CSS code in a lot of the table tags in the themes. This, to me, means that it's going to be a mess to go through all of the thtml files and try to get them to be consistent in applying CSS structures. Is there any point to doing this? Or would I just be better off doing a global search/replace for specific colors?
(2) More of a preferential question: anyone have any good tools for working on editing the template files? (FYI - linux geek - want to stick with linux based tools.) I was trying to work with vim initially, but my minimal profficiency with vi doesn't appear to be up to this job.
The big thing that I was looking to do is: grep all the thtml files for td's or color / background attributes, use a list of the results to navigate through the files and fix / modify them for my theme.
There's obviously tons of good tools out there. I tried Bluefish and Screem this morning - couldn't (a) quite get used to them, (b) find this kind of functionality in them.
Anyone have any suggestions? (At this point I am thinking I might look for an extension to jed that might do this kind of thing...that's my regular editing tool.)
// George
Theme hacking questions
Posted on: 06/16/04 02:18pm
By: Dirk
I'd say the mixture of HTML and CSS for appearance (rather than doing all the appearance in CSS) is a (bad) habit that's carried over from the days when CSS support in browsers wasn't as good as it is now. And since everyone who's doing a theme is usually basing it on some other theme, these things are just dragged along.
With the way Geeklog works, you probably can't do an all-CSS layout (i.e. getting rid of tables for layout purposes), but there's no need to set colors and the like in HTML - that should all be done in CSS really.
bye, Dirk
Theme hacking questions
Posted on: 06/17/04 07:49am
By: James Fryer
You might want to look at this:
Download[*1]
It's based on Classic but it uses styles -- the only files you should need to change are header.thtml and style.css. There are no hard-coded attributes in the templates (unless I've missed some).
It's not as finished as I'd like, which is why I haven't released it properly.
Theme hacking questions
Posted on: 06/17/04 07:50am
By: SoundChaser
[QUOTE BY= Dirk]...is a (bad) habit that's carried over from the days when CSS support in browsers wasn't as good as it is now. ...[/QUOTE]
Ahh - history. Gotta love it. Makes a lot of sense -- especially given the history of the browsers.
[QUOTE BY= Dirk]With the way Geeklog works, you probably can't do an all-CSS layout (i.e. getting rid of tables for layout purposes), but there's no need to set colors and the like in HTML - that should all be done in CSS really.[/QUOTE]
Yeah - I wasn't thinking of trying to do all of the layout in CSS, primarily the textual and visual attributes. I was just surprised - I was thinking it was going to be a relatively short project (under 5 hrs) until I looked at the template files.
I'll try to upload and document the results I come up with. Maybe a newer set of templates can start leaning folks towards a cleaner layout of the files -- which will hopefully help with converting to GL2 once it gets going.
// George
Theme hacking questions
Posted on: 06/17/04 07:53am
By: SoundChaser
[QUOTE BY= James Fryer] It's based on Classic but it uses styles -- the only files you should need to change are header.thtml and style.css. There are no hard-coded attributes in the templates (unless I've missed some).
It's not as finished as I'd like, which is why I haven't released it properly.[/QUOTE]
Hi James,
Thanks! I've downloaded it and will take a look at it this evening. (Just running out to work now...)
// George
Update: Jim - just had a chance to look at (a) your templates, and (b) your site. I definitely like your approach. It's exactly in line with what I was looking for. Thank you again!