Can another theme be added for the forums?

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JoshDW19

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I'm going to slowly migrate the various guides I've authored over time to the Resources section, now that it's working.

@JoshDW19 - many thanks for getting that thing to work. (Now comes the nitpicking :p). Spacing in the resources section suffers from the same issue as comments did. It just needs a little bit of indent.

There you go. It should be in line with the rest of the theme now. Oh and another note on resources. Moderators you can create multiple categories to divide resources if we start to get a substantial amount of resources.
 

Tigersharke

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I know it's a bit unusual to have 10 pages of unread posts, but the bottom navigation bar looks a little strange with the arrows inside the number bar.
View attachment 12022
On pcbsd.forums.org those are depicted as "..." which may be more relatable? When I locate where it is choosing the arrow chars I can switch them. Some other things like colors are a little quicker/easier to adjust since its CSS. I'm assuming the arrow change will be in the structural template(s) which should (common sense) affect any area of the forum which has similar selector.

Update: Fixed.
 

Tigersharke

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Continuing mostly aesthetic changes to 'Experimental' theme. Trying to fix the more obvious odd colored stuff first and look to forum users to help point out other situations that I might not see. nit-picking is ok with me, my theme fairly early on diverged from joshms's so what might need adjusting in CSS/templates of one theme *might* not affect the other. :D You may notice the 'online' ribbon near the avatar is a little different and I removed the redundant upper-left corner "online color". I noticd that for some bizarre reason an 'x' in the font that had been set in my theme was displayed exceptionally weirdly, so switched the default font for messages. Its not really my favorite font but at least it doesn't have that oddness *shrugs*. Also adjusted the "new" ribbon a bit to hopefully stand out a bit more.

With any luck most of the changes I make in CSS do not somehow accidentally get overridden or lost in any way. You all would truly not quite believe how many CSS and template files are involved in this forum behind the scenes, as well as the enormity of the built-in style configurator thingy. I cannot believe anyone would actually go through all of those color chooser panels to develop a theme.. its overwhelming, just way too much. Eventually I'll clarify/distill everything into a much more orderly arrangement but for now _most_ of my adjustments are in one override CSS file- except for those few (structural) template modifications that have been made (ie. the corner-color online, and the extra message count).

Code:
This is a test of the "code" tags etc.


No nested quotes?
Just for completeness another quote.
And for fun, a quote inside
No *distinction* between nested quotes like this, other than indent. <-- need fix.

Worked perfect. Again awesome work you are doing here, it looks great.

Except if there is attribution via [ QUOTE="yadda yadda"]

I don't see much distinction between quote bubbles until the post is selected by a checkbox in the lower left. This is unusual.. I can see that some things darken or change color but odd that it seems to be a "hidden feature". Something I will have to excentuate a bit more I think- as well as making the quote bubbles visible without a tick.

 
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Jailer

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One thing on the New Style theme that changed recently. The text on the main page is ok but when you go to a sub forum the text for each thread is a light purple or lavender color. It's very light and difficult to read and needs more contrast against a light grey background.

There. You asked for nit picks, you got one. :D
 
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Bidule0hm

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There. You asked for nit picks, you got one. :D

I've another one :D

The current selected page button is the same as the others so it's difficult to see on which page your are. It's already been reported I think but you may have forgot about it.

However it's the only thing that bother me, you've done a very good job ;)
 

Tigersharke

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I've another one :D

The current selected page button is the same as the others so it's difficult to see on which page your are. It's already been reported I think but you may have forgot about it.

However it's the only thing that bother me, you've done a very good job ;)

Thanks. Just to be clear, the theme I focus on is 'Experimental' (presently a lot of red tones) and the one joshms handles is 'New Style' while we both might attempt to fix flaws in the default theme. I can certainly attempt to make adjustments to 'New Style' but it may get confusing if adjustments were made to the theme I work on most. For this specific instance I will see if they still need fixing and then insert a comment in the CSS about them. I am also unsure how Xenforo handles concurrent editing, so that is another thing to consider.
So it is, for New Style:
  1. subforum text contrast on main page,
  2. current selected page button uniqueness.
 

Bidule0hm

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Aww, I thought it was you. So yeah, I was talking about the theme "new style", sorry for the confusion.
 

Tigersharke

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Not a big deal.

New Style adjustments
I switched one color that was rgb (3, 151, 215) to a darker shade of rgb (2,135,193) which seemed not dark enough, so switched to rgb(2, 120, 172). Since it is less than simple to strictly use a color picker to choose hues, I chose to insert the original color into an online color picking page that goes a bit further with explanation and options. Then inserted that color code into the Xenforo color picker for @PrimaryMedium. The other, since it seemed to be colored directly by the CSS file, I chose to simply add a shadow, so that Josh could decide later on some other method. I edited page_nav.css to add box-shadow: 0px 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0, .75); to .PageNav a.currentPage.

Those two issues should be resolved until further tweaks by Josh.
 
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Jailer

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2, 120, 172 looks good. It's the text that colored 105, 153, 225 in the New Style theme that doesn't look right. There are several elements that have this color now that I'm looking for it.

Screen names in the user info panel in posts.
Home page links in the user info panel in posts.
The download link in the forum header.
Watch, un watch, mark forums read and recent posts links on pages.
Text in the quick link bar at the top of the forum.
Text in post titles in subforums.

And you thought this was going to be easy. :) Wish I knew more on how to help with this styling but I don't have the knowledge to help at all. What you have done so far looks fantastic.
 

Tigersharke

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2, 120, 172 looks good. It's the text that colored 105, 153, 225 in the New Style theme that doesn't look right. There are several elements that have this color now that I'm looking for it.

Screen names in the user info panel in posts.
Home page links in the user info panel in posts.
The download link in the forum header.
Watch, un watch, mark forums read and recent posts links on pages.
Text in the quick link bar at the top of the forum.
Text in post titles in subforums.

And you thought this was going to be easy. :) Wish I knew more on how to help with this styling but I don't have the knowledge to help at all. What you have done so far looks fantastic.

It seems those are all a:link a:visited and are now adjusted to be rgb(2, 120, 172) in the EXTRA.css for New Style. I wasn't sure where to place it, so I simply added it to the end of the file.
 

Jailer

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Worked perfect. Again awesome work you are doing here, it looks great.
 

Ericloewe

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@JoshDW19 heads up: the "Reply" marker you get after selecting text to quote has become rather hard to read.

upload_2016-6-2_11-33-44.png
 

Tigersharke

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Recent changes to Experimental
  • Noticed that there was a column heading in the sub-forum listing that had nothing below it. This is the start date and clicking this heading changed the order as expected and thus i found which value it described. Those are now float-right to be under the heading and the 'edit' link is float-left to be near the avatar images.
  • Working on the buttons, such as Post Reply, Upload a File, and More Options. I like the present end-result of the Post Reply (aka Primary button) but want to style the other two similarly yet in greys. What we have now is better than the former version but I will surely do rework on both for consistency and to remove CSS redundancies. IMHO, how ever I design it, the main color should bleed through for the other modifications. The changes to these buttons remove yet another gradient image to replace with CSS technique.
  • Attempted some improvements for the help page display, each panel is a little different. This one seems especially challenging as there don't seem to be enough .class or #id selectors in the (structural) template.
  • While typing this message, I noticed how unordered list items are smashed together a bit, so added a little spacing between each. Later I can improve the css to be friendlier but for now its some pixels of padding rather than a percent or some other calculation etc. Of course the same will be done for ordered lists.
  • Ordered lists are fixed to match.
  • I fixed the itemPageNav so that it is now in a better position, to the right of the 'edit' link.
  • Noticed some weird color issue(s) on one of the headers, fixed that but then that caused the hover to be white for the whole section, a relatively easy fix to make the hover nearer the same- but it still changes slightly (I blame the somewhat sloppy CSS for that, part my own doing as I have used a bit of alpha channel colors).

Thoughts and stuff..
  1. I have been noticing some oddness with the Share This Page buttons, I believe it is caused by privacy badger addon: the G+ button is duplicated and maybe causes formatting oddness. Further investigation I have discovered that each of these share buttons is not handled the same, G+ has a bunch of inline style stuff while the others might not and if one is 'static' position, shouldn't they all be? or maybe they should all be 'relative? Just weird, it deserves some work.
  2. Generally there seems to be either not enough or too much ambiguity in the use of .class or #id selectors within the structural templates which usually means that one way to style any certain element by less than specific selector(s) might bleed over to other locations accidentally. I am not even sure every time when this happens or not. There are some things on the PC-BSD forum site that are styled very nicely and where those items are similar here, I will attempt to style them nearly identically.
  3. I wonder if there is any style for printouts should anyone desire them. I would imagine mostly a whole lot less color would be needed in those instances. Something for me to work on in time. Afaik there is no such thing on the other forum site either.
  4. Need to fix side-effect of list modifications: WHISKEY-wig (wysikwyg: what you see is kinda what you get). I have been fighting to apply the spacing for those lists to these edit boxes but I cannot yet seem to _select_ them. If I am imprecise, I am sure it will affect other areas of the site.
  5. Similar to that column in the sub-forum that lacked content, there are page selector boxes that now disturb the flow- visible for this topic as an example. Those need to be 'selectored' and CSS adjusted over to the left when i get a chance. Investigation proves that it will be a structural template change. I need to move the span out of one div and into another.
  6. Why did it take me so long to find the BBcode crib sheet via help link here? I knew I ran across it but forgot where.. just happened to look at the bottom of the page links.
  7. Am I the only one who is on both FreeNAS forums and PC-BSD forums, *and* has noticed how much difference of load time there is between the two? IMHO, very unacceptable, its aggravating as someone who is only just perfecting a site theme, I'd hate to be in need of urgent help via forum(s). I feel like I should do a "+1" to this comment every time I edit this message.. its a grating/aggravating slowness for me. Perhaps my firefox has gotten itself a touch bit slow as well but.. there's no excuse! :)
  8. The Post New Thread button is displaying very oddly. I'll have to investigate to see why it has chosen to be so wonky (obviously *I* had nothing to do with it, the site does things on its own without me.. :p ) Actually, it was a combination of inconsistent selectors and imperfect design, with a need to place the upper right button below the search box. While this solved that search box overlap area, it broke the lower right copy of the same button.
  9. Oopsie! I've been using a bit of inaccurate/invalid CSS which easily could explain some of my mixed results- especially if Firefox is inconsistent on these wrong values. Primarily it was using rgba for background when no alpha is allowed, so only hex or rgb (without the alpha). Working on fixing this and other various overrides that are wrong values, trying to discover the proper values to "disable" the original setting without causing a new effect or taking any space (ie, remove padding, borders, backgrounds, etc).
 
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Tigersharke

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I have been updating/editing the prior post with various things relating to the Experimental theme. Perhaps I should add new posts periodically, maybe even work on eliminating some of the items in the list(s) in order to create a new 'update' post. Most recent changes have been relating to the profile page. I discovered the error(s) that caused the elements listed to get shifted down. Color changes, spacing and other fixes. I have started to validate my EXTRA.css file so that what is there is correct and functional. Changes due to validation have caused some unintended consequences that if cause weird style issues will get corrected.

As I stated earlier, I can try to find things to fix on my own but nitpicks may get corrected soon(er/est) if I am reminded that they've been spotted by you members. The improvements to the theme (Experimental) will continue until I am satisfied that it is complete, then rounds of validation followed by other clean-up and basic organization type changes, always further validation and corrections as needed. Once I have no reason to tweak anything, I can create hue variations. This theme may be a bit too red for some, so I also have been considering modifications in a related theme which might begin to look similar to the red theme at forums.pcbsd.org site.
 

Mirfster

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Bidule0hm

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The correct form is "tout de suite" ;)
 

Mirfster

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The correct form is "tout de suite" ;)
Ahh, well I tried... Once had a girlfriend who would always say that but more like "toot suite". Was kinda neat at first but after the millionth time became like nails on a chalkboard. So I dumped her tout de suite...
 
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