Xenforo 1.x Forum themes: "Ganz großes Kino theme" - changelog

[Tigersharke]

Hello!

I have decided that it may be best to seperate my frequent changelogesque comments about the Ganz großes Kino theme and your requests for improvements to it, from those of the other theme (aka New Style). Therefore, the other thread has been closed and two new threads exist to replace it. This will be sticky until it gets going, and then it might be unstuck. Comments and discussion relate to the Ganz großes Kino theme as shown in the image below.

UPDATE: Theme renamed from Experimental to Ganz großes Kino

These are your hue options in this theme:

 

[Tigersharke]

Okee. Minor adjustments for the moment, always more tweaks for the future.

• Forum thread list alternating row shading now includes avatar column and stats column is a lighter variation.
• More adjustments to searchbox *again* and still not pleased with appearance but position is better. It may need a bit more drastic adjustment in its template.

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• Adjusted the hover effect for the 'home' button so that it matches the original upper left border radius instead of a square corner.
• Attempted to adjust the 'alerts' button in a similar fashion but it seems to have a different sort of selector/css which is eluding me at the moment.

A plan for the sidebar stuff that is redundant and causes the message/comment width to be condensed, is to shift it to the footer instead. There would be some further modification so that (as needed) boxes/containers would be full-width and likely not visibly defined. I am looking into the template but it may take a bit to properly understand it and when I start putzing with it there will be plenty of (temporary) hiccups.
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It appears that the sidebar causing the message/comment space to be narrower is unique to the New Style theme, so I won't need to wonder any more why the Experimental theme has no such issue.

 

[Tigersharke]

Hmm.. took me a little to find this again after being gone so long. Good thing its a watched thread and easy to access by that.

I looked through some old messages and discovered the new 'Resources' area mentioned as a place some posts will be moved and how it would be handled by mods. I guess I expected 'Resources' to be another forum area like the others but couldn't find it until I discovered a link somewhere to it. From there I backed out of it only to discover *duh!* its in the bar near "Forums" tab. Well.. so to finally get to the real reason for this post..

When I looked at the Resources section, I found that the theme I created and prefer to use does not look good there. So I'll hopefully manage some adjustments to the Experimental theme to vastly improve colors and readability of the Resources section.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Made some adjustments to the colors used in the resources section so that most things should be a lot easier to read.

 

[Tigersharke]

Looks like I may want to investigate the trophys system templates and affected dropdown(s).

• Adjusted the background color from a transparent to a proper grey for the areas between the forum groupings. This reduces the amount of red on the screen a bit. I think my main concept was more greys and reds, but less of the pale/pink tones.
• Adjusted colors for some group membership buttons. Administrator is now legible and both it and Moderator have a more pronounced shadow.
• Profile "personal details" page: Adjustments to some positioning, text colors, and font sizes.
• Line spacing and font size adjustments to resources sidebar list and featured resources boxes.
• Adjustments to text colors of admin/mod top "alert" bar.
• Fixed the strange white-space issue reported about the resources section.
• Fixed strange spacing issue with content text of resource updates.
• Made "deleted post text" visible (changed color) and switched to percentage font size.
• Fixed the color of the .sidebar .avatarList .userTitle so that it is more visible.
• Adjusted colors in user profile so that text is more visible.

 

[Tigersharke]

It seems that sometimes its two steps forward, one step back. Must reiterate Xenforo CSS/theme/templates needlessly complicated. Perhaps eventually I can clarify my own theme and its CSS and templates, to be a whole lot cleaner solution, a behind-the-scenes improvement that would also hopefully make the creation of hue-variants easier. Some things I cannot yet seem to affect due to how/where the CSS is defined or difficulty with selector choice or complexity of template construction and/or interrelation of CSS effects.

• Color changes in the forum category listing- desperately want to have each category section with rounded corners, eliminate or conform the bottom border to that curve.
  
• Visual/color changes in the resources section- BTW: "featured resource" display is broken by design, will only show with Latest Updates tab selected.
• Further improvements to member list display, some font color and size changes.
• Adjusted resources listing for alternating row shades similar to other sections.
• Changed the thread #pageDescription font to be a percent size and switched from a green to an overlay color that creates a super dark red in this theme.
• Fixed the 'New' ribbon position again, somehow it ended up shifting badly, then overlapping the member list or other items in the right-side panel.

 

[Tigersharke]

Somehow CSS can be complicated and interactions of some selectors can sometimes take a bit of time to unravel. Continuing progress toward cleaner more consistent CSS and eventual essential finalization and then hue variants. Plenty more work to do for resizeability of various things (ie, percentage of a base font size, proportional spacing, etc).

• Improved buttons for general uniformity. Some buttons gained an improved hover and/or active(click) color change effect.
• Re-position thread control tab under the border that was added.
• Made the section header bar for the forum post listing a deep red, fixed the hover effect (subtle highlight).
• Re-Validated all of my Extra.css.
• Adjusted forum description tooltips to be snug on small text content.
• Attempted to enlarge proportionally the "last post" box but the RSS icon refused to cooperate, reverted changes. May need to revise the templates, want to switch to fontawesome RSS character.
  
• Changed the color of the 'deleted resource' and 'resource version' in the resource list.
• Resources section: Colorized the 'resource' prefix and the 'featured' tag.
• Fixed spacing issues in the featured resources caused by colorized 'resource'.
• Yes, the search box is quite the eyesore now.

 

[Tigersharke]

Improvements continue. Present focus is the tab bar and its colors and shapes where applicable.

• Finally solved the weird hover effect for the 'alerts' tab (far right).
• The active tab no longer has an odd color for background nor text highlight. (While reading this post, the active tab is up top, marked "Forums")
• Added somewhat of a shadow along three edges of the active tab.

Next things I may tackle are:

• The hover colors for the tabs in the top row,
• the color and shape of the hover effect in the second row tab items,
• Continue to remove/revise instances of peachy/pink colors to darken or make a shade of grey.
• The various gadget dropdowns (ie, Resources, Members, "Username", Inbox, and Alerts) need some improvement for color and [linethrough]somewhat less[/linethrough] remove transparency.
• Replace instances of gradients created by tiled images with similar modern CSS effects.
• Organize the content of my EXTRA.css file so that there are less duplication and similar things are together.
• Eventually I'd like to make 'Forum Rules' and 'Documentation' links into proper tabs with the same effects as the others. It seems a POLA violation for those links to cause the 'Forums' tab to open, even though its the home for those two.

If there are other POLA issues or inconsistent style stuff, let me know and I'll try to get things to be nearly identical.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Improved the appearance of the search box in the upper right.
• Re-colored the searchbox dropdown.
• Improved the colors for menu tab dropdowns (ie, username, inbox, alerts).

Its been a little bit of a challenge yet again to get some of these things revised to my liking. Some regressions and some things incomplete at the moment.

• Need to re-fix the border radius for 'Alerts' button hover highlight.
• Need to make parts of some dropdowns (same ones above) opaque.

I'm starting to run out of things to improve and/or make fit the theme as it has evolved. The main thing will still be consistency of size shape or color, so that various portions of the theme that one would expect to be the same will be the same.

 

[Tigersharke]

Oddity:
The "Go to first unread" button is not themed like any other button (selector difference?) but it also does not seem to appear consistently.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Top tabs all have identical background "highlight" on hover.
• Border radius for hover color is incorrect again for "home" and "Alerts" buttons.
• Finally erradicated the faint line between the selected tab and the second row of tabs (noticeable when "Forums" tab is selected).
• Fixed the color and shape of the hover effect for the second row of tabs.

 

[Tigersharke]

I've noticed that there are areas of the forum that cause a complete page refresh/redraw instead of simply displaying the new information/page. I am unsure why this is, but it may be related to how every small piece of how Xenforo is designed has its own CSS or other resource. I want to look into solving this so that there are only complete refresh/redraw of the page when truly necessary. It feels a bit "jarring" when it happens and definitely adds time to any experience that might already feel slow.

I continue to try to find areas that need a little theme "touch up" and making those adjustments. Those areas are becoming more challenging to discover. It looks like I can begin to make adjustments for proportional fonts, meaning that they would be all size-relative according to a base font, which can mean a page resize may function with less hiccups.

• Added a border to the hover effect for the upper tabs.
  
• Fixed an instance of pink where a pale grey was intended.
• Revised the gradient and colors for the breadcrumbs bar.
• Fixed some spacing issues in the profile posts section.
• Adjusted some colors in the profile section, particularly the followers listing.

I will have to look for other instances where in my own CSS, I mistakenly re-define something, particularly contrary to my intent.
Nearly forgot:

• Switch sprites to fontawesome equivalent where possible.
• Switch instances of gradient via tiled/repeated image to equivalent/similar/better CSS gradient.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Improved theme consistency for the profile messages section.
  • tabs look more like the top tabs (row with "home" etc)
• Fixed some spacing issues with text.
• Fixed some fallout from an obviously over-broad selector- should solve this rather than put out all the unintended fires.
• Adjustments to the page selector and tabs for the profile messages section have caused inconsistent changes elsewhere (see prior). Will have to look deeper into this cascading problem later, however it did seem to point out some other inconsistencies which means the final solution will be a compromise/combination of sorts.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Revised the "latest post" box to be larger and thus include a longer portion of the post title. Prior attempt caused overlap with the RSS feed icon, and this change may still cause overlap on some dimensions. Real fix for overlap is a layout adjustment in the template rather than CSS.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Fixed the remaining fallout- the page selector bar/buttons area should in most instances be the same as the background (red).
• Fixed tabs in 'Resources' section so that hover and non-active tabs match the active tab (aside from colors etc).
• Fixed some text spacing issues in the New Profile Posts section.
• Fixed the position of the tab row on the member page.
• Fixed some weird border issues with the forum list, bottom item of each group visible with rounded corners.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Switched the RSS feed icon with a fontawesome alternative and positioned it beside the title it references.
• Adjusted the width and margins of some entities so that the forum titles and 'latest post' box might coexist better and adapt to smaller size browser viewports.
• Added hover effect for rss icon.
• Improved 'tag' appearance, greater color contrast, now black text.
• Switched the 'jumpmenutrigger' to a fontawesome equivalent and adjusted positioning.
• Added a hover effect to the jumpmenutrigger.
• Fixed some colors for the condensed version of the 'Forum Rules .. Bug' link dropdown and hover effect when opened.
• Adjusted top and bottom border colors of forum group title boxes to remove mistaken red/pink shades.
• Added highlight and shadow effect borders for each forum grouping.
• Removing more overlay/alpha colors that cause pinks/peach.
  • whole messageuserblock (to left of each message, has avatar & title etc).
• Revised top and bottom edges of messageuserblock for a little highlight and shadow.
• Revised spacing of breadcrumbs.
• Revised thanks box to remove rounded border, darken, and add top light border.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Adjusted spacing, size, colors of pagenav buttons.
• Switched the "sticky" pin icon to a fontawesome alternative.
• Switched the locked icon to a fontawesome alternative.

I've noticed that closed/locked threads have some formatting differences that I'll have to fix eventually. Forums with sub-category/sub-forums have other differences as well that need to be adjusted. Luckily I am discovering these 'oddities' on my own since there really has been nearly zero feedback otherwise. The sooner I can perfect this theme, the more quickly I can work on creating the dark theme variant and other hue variants.

 

[Tigersharke]

• In the thread listing, the small icons for sticky (pushpin), closed/locked (lock), moderate (id badge), watch (binoculars), and redirect are now fontawesome alternates. I cannot manage to cause a condition where the redirect icon would become visible, so I cannot say more about it except that it is supposed to be a box with an arrow pointing down and then toward the right.
  
• There is another template (or more) that uses the same icons but that I have not yet modified to use the fontawesome alternative. IMHO, it would have been much too easy/sensible for the block of icon "toggles" to be in their own template and then included in all subsequent templates/locations. This might be another task for another time.

Xenforo allows some real oddness. It is possible to create a link-forum, which can either redirect into a local url or outside to a remote url. A link-forum can have a child forum of any of the various types, which cannot be accessed by the usual method. The child of a link-forum is reached only by the sub-forum dropdown of its parent forum. Strange huh?

• Changed the deleted resource icon to fontawesome alternative.
  
• Need to adjust the thread alerts box, and the icons that may appear there, and other icons in general area of the footer of a thread view.
• Need to fix the search result page.

 

[Tigersharke]

At the moment it seems that developing a simple dropdown style selector is impossible here. I believe I had all of the details correct but for whatever reason the variables necessary to succeed were not getting expanded in all contexts and I don't know why. I still believe the whiz-bang method of an overlay (somehow broken for this theme) or opening a seperate page with thumbnails (which are all identical, aka worthless thumbnails) is far beyond what is truly necessary and feels too much of a side-track when its used.

• Switched the RSS icon in the footer to the fontawesome alternative, styled and sized similar to other instances.
• Sized, positioned, and styled the thankyou box in resources section to match other instances.

 

[Tigersharke]

• Changed the "unanswered threads" button text to black (so it stands out more, subtly).
  
• Minor polish added to avatar image instances.
• Adjusted avatar box in alerts dropdown.
• Removed transparency lingering in dropdown(s) particularly in alerts dropdown.
• Improved color of date abbreviation in alerts dropdown.
• Removed rounded borders of highlight hover in alerts dropdown.
• Adjusted width of list items in member dropdown menu.