XenForo 1.x Forum themes: "Ganz großes Kino theme" - Discussion, Comments, Requests

[Tigersharke]

If you find something that needs improvement, adjustment. If you have some ideas please post them here.

Ganz großes Kino
- Red - Blue - Dark - Bright

Ganz großes Kino is a figure of speech and expresses that someone put on a great show. It is also used to describe someone who magnificently
failed to accomplish some task. Ziemlich großes Kino is just a big cinema. – Hendrik Vogt

 

[Ericloewe]

Hmm, yes, dark is good. Saves us AMOLED phone users battery life and it's easier on everyone's eyes.

 

[Tigersharke]

The dark theme has a few things not exactly perfect but its about as usable as the original Experimental. I guess, "Experimental" because things could suddenly change. Certainly possible that someone saw random color changes around various parts one evening. I was trying to track down which CSS selector affected which part. Had to beat on it furiously to solve the flaw in the hover for 'Home' and 'Alert' links.

I also noticed that the "visitor" tabs have flaw(s) in their style since the switch from red background to the grey.

 

[Tigersharke]

Hmm. It looks like I might want to do some work on how these entities interact when the viewport is smaller than 350px wide or zoomed in heavily, the overlap is very ugly and may impede function. Dark theme is worse initially and does no better.

The three horizontal bars icon and the elipsis icons are useful but the positioning of the elements need to be fixed to eliminate the overlap. The search icon needs to be changed to fontawesome.
I have also looked into the concept of "responsive" design and will need to dig deeper into the CSS that I modify to see where things get complicated due to such things.

 

[Tigersharke]

Okee. I may have been wrong previously or something changed. If the Zoom is X7 then the view is not muddled such as above, or if the browser window is shrunk no smaller than 340px wide. Of course, if the browser window is shrunk and the zoom is negative/decease size overall, then it will also prevent the muddle effect. I believe there is something within the "responsive" stuff that has a 340 or 350px barrier. I may try to make adjustments so that in all of various situations things continue to appear nearly the same or adjust in usable ways.

 

[Tigersharke]

Future plans:

• Revise "your account" page so that tabs work as one may expect, dropping content into body of page rather than sending the user to another indirectly connected page. This will take considerable revision of the templates involved. I hope it is possible. This would mean that Experimental Ganz großes Kino theme may vary a bit more distinctly from the other themes since it will not only be color choices etc.
• Further seperate Experimental Ganz großes Kino theme from whatever its originating theme had been. Being entirely unique will allow some flexibility and could reduce future issues relating to automatically applied updates/changes of its constituent templates. Whatever any sort of base/core templates may be required should be kept intact or as similar as possible so as to prevent other random problems.
• Other hue variant themes such as green and blue, unless if anyone has specific requests(s). Possibly, simply for continuity, a color scheme similar to the present default theme as well.

 

[Tigersharke]

More "behind the scenes" reorganization which should make further theme work much easier. A parent theme for Experimental Ganz großes Kino has been created. It will contain the adjustments that are common to all of the Experimental Ganz großes Kino theme group members. This parent theme is not intended to be used, which means it is unselectable but I believe it would be a mish-mosh of the default Xenforo theme and the common adjustments. Each of the color themes will inherit from the parent theme but have its own unique EXTRA_color.css file and their EXTRA.css file will have only one modification, to add a Xenforo include line which causes the EXTRA_color.css file to be drawn into it.

So far, I have not noticed any hiccups from the process of dividing up the CSS into the seperate .css files. The eventual green, blue, and other color themes should appear quickly after this separation is complete since the real work will be contained in one relatively small file. I would need only create a child theme, modify the EXTRA.css file, and copy then modify the EXTRA_color.css file. A similar system was put together for the myBB forum site I themed in the past, though it has some mechanism to facilitate this, and I believe the separation mostly clean among the theme variants.

UPDATE:

I believe I have finished with separating the red adjustments into their own css file as well as removing those same color adjustments from the parent EXTRA.css file.

It should have dawned on me sooner that I can sort of conditionally include a file via the xenforo include mechanism. If the file does not exist, it cannot be included. So, this means that instead of re-pasting the include line into a newly reverted EXTRA.css file for each hue, I can leave it within the parent. I renamed the EXTRA_color.css file to EXTRA_hue_stuff.css and there will then be a specific file in each hue variant. I tested the theory, even though I really shouldn't have needed to verify it, and it works as expected.

 

[Tigersharke]

It is possible that some of you may have noticed that the red theme momentarily vanished, causing your theme choice to go away as well (probably turning to default). This was my fault due to cleaning up how the themes inherit stuff. The original experimental Ganz großes Kino theme (red) was made the parent for the others. A new Experimental Ganz großes Kino Style Red theme was made by way of inheritance from the parent theme. I wrongfully caused a lot of unique templates to be assigned to this red theme which I later realized were not needed. The fastest way to remove all of the unique templates and go back to pure inherited templates is to start over fresh, then copy over the single different template, EXTRA_hue_stuff.css file.

The reason why you lost your choice of theme, possibly twice, is due to how Xenforo identifies the themes and saves your choice in the system. Every new theme gets a unique number, I do not believe they are ever re-cycled. This means that the red theme, created three times, had three different ID numbers. The parent, technically maintains the original ID number but it is marked not selectable. The third red theme is now the one that is available, while number two was deleted.

As you may have noticed, just as I suggested, quickly and easily created, a third variation is now available, blue. Proper "blue" tends to be rather bright and can be difficult to read with black text. What we have may be more of a cobalt blue, darker tending possibly nearer to violet. I may make some adjustments to improve black text on blue background as needed.

Other future changes include removing more gradients made with images and switching more icons from small graphic sprites to fontawesome equivalents. These types of changes will affect all hue themes simultaneously since the modifications will be made to their parent and then be inherited.

UPDATE:
Attempted to switch the star ratings from graphic sprites to fontawesome with only partial success so I rolled back the template mods. I am not sure if I can get the whole thing switched as I would like but it looks like it will take a lot more time/effort to succeed.

 

[Tigersharke]

Online indicator near Avatar in forum message view is back! I didn't notice that it had gone missing...

 

[Tigersharke]

You may have noticed there are three choices for the Experimental Ganz großes Kino theme color scheme though I didn't mention it here until now: red, blue, dark.
I was mistaken that the red theme seems to have some flaws in its specific hue file which is causing a hiccup with the calltoaction button but it turned out to be an error in the parent. It is now fixed along with general organization of hue files to match. Some extra lines in the dark theme and some common lines in the hue files will either be eliminated or moved into the parent. I will have to attempt to clean up the parent EXTRA.css file and organize it as much as possible.

 

[Tigersharke]

Used the Xenforo 'online' style editor to modify color variables to help discover areas I have not yet defined. These will be a bright blue (#0000ff) and bright green (#00ff00). Especially glaring in either dark or red themes. Unfortunately it seems that those 'online' style edits are overriding any EXTRA.css adjustments I attempt, not sure if I am failing to choose the right selector(s) or if something else is goofy, but its not nice. I am going to excise those variables, since they choose not to cooperate. We shall see what breakage/oddness ensues after those are removed.
It is a long and tedious process to find and /* comment out */ those @variables in the css files but making slow progress. The metric I can follow aside from the indication that the template has been editied/modified, is that the out-of-place blue or green are vanishing bit by bit.
The editor now displays a different font than it had been, which is unexpected since I do not believe I made any such adjustments (directly). The buttons for the gui editor need some help since I seem to have made them red in my quest to force a visible change while I was trying to override those variables.

 

[Tigersharke]

Well, it seems that Xenforo is designed un such a way as to evade common sense. The Experimental Ganz großes Kino themes are badly broken due to attempts to remove @variables from the css files. My only reasonable guess is that at some point during my modification, I typo'ed and this is why the colors are so very wrong. The css in the EXTRA.css and the EXTRA_hue_stuff.css included into it, should all be valid and loaded/used, but it is not, does not even seem to be loaded at all. I am attempting to look through to see if there are any obvious errors but as yet, I have not been successful.

This is why the experimental Ganz großes Kino themes group are not selectable at this time. As soon as I can make them closer to usable again, they then will be enabled.

 

[Tigersharke]

I found one error but it was in a css file unlikely to be used often (file uploader), and looking at the render after, obviously things are still broken. However, I also found other insances of the @variables that were not commented out. Such a tedious process but eventually I'll find it or cement the idea that Xenforo has some odd way of doing things "ghost in the machine" style. The error I found was a doubled semicolon so at least I am still sharp this evening/AM.

 

[Tigersharke]

Great news! I seem to have discovered the primary error among the css files. In the sidebar css file, there was a missing } to close a group of css values for a selector. Right after that was fixed, and I reloaded my tabs, my dark theme is looking much more like itself. I am going to look through the remaining modified css files to see if anything else may have been missed, including to comment out those @variables.

UPDATE: There may be a couple outstanding issues to correct (such as the red editor buttons) but I have finished looking through the Experimental (parent) css files. The Experimental Ganz großes Kino themes will be enabled (for user selection) momentarily.

UPDATE: Adjusted those editor buttons, no longer red. Restored hover color for editor buttons.

 

[Tigersharke]

Tried again to create a simple style/theme dropdown selector but thwarted once more. It is strange that I can copy verbatim the section that creates the dropdown from the account preferences page, but it does not populate it. The template includes a xenforo loop and variables relating to an array of styles available to choose. I am still baffled as to why things will not work as expected. I do not want to use either method that is default built-in to xenforo for theme selection in the footer. One way is an overlay with dim surrounding area, the other way is to load an entirely different page that contains the options all at once. I am uncertain why I see the "new page" version instead of the overlay version via Experimental theme, but that is less important than my dislike for both. The account preference page provides all of those same options in a dropdown menu, so the assumption is that I could use that method in the footer.

The selector has two options, neither were populated by the loop. The current choice, and the site default. The selector is within a hide mechanism, simple css that can be overridden by a stylish style sheet with !important; so this test is not generally visible in most cases.

 

[Tigersharke]

Those duplicates that were deleted had been caused by bad timing of attempted posting (forum in midst of its nightly fail). Multiple attempts to post without recognizing success, then the one 10 hours later was the only one known to be completely submitted.. but it too was in excess.

Anyhow. New news, I may be looking into some small amount of "using the Xenforo online style configurator" to set some values but given the wackadoo way that the color variables got used within the theme, I do not plan to include those (at least not at present or the near future). I am also considering moving various details of my EXTRA.css in the Experimental 'parent' theme into the various dozens of constituent css files. This should help allieviate the vast use of !important; on each line of css that are my adjustments.

I remain interested in helping the Experimental Ganz großes Kino theme become a complete departure from the bulk of its origin(s) but if this might include file name changes, that is something I must investigate further. I need to better understand how everything fits together, know which bits are part of any default/base Xenforo thing(s), and eventually develop any needed scripts/techniques of my own. The closer I get to Experimental having all of its many details perfected, the sooner it will be renamed (has been, any Experimental theme that may exist now relates to following) and set out as a theme unlikely to be modified further. Then, as a starting point I can use a duplicate of the parent along with any of the hue files to create my departure theme. When the departure theme gets stable enough, I may allow it to be selected but at that point it would be called 'Experimental' with its perceived potential for change/breakage by its very name.

UPDATE:

I still need to work on making all of the various color choices (greys primarily) consistent across the entire theme. I like how the forum category list looks, and hope to duplicate this. Then along with this consistency, I want to at least clean up the css once more. I may either convert my choices of selector to those that had already been used by the original theme stuff, or use my version of selector and remove the original theme stuff.. or a combination (most likely). Some of the conflicts and difficulties I have relate to attempting to reference any onscreen entity by way of a selector, but sometimes the original selector somehow pinpoints the entity more easily than I can determine by way of the in-browser "Inspect Element" tool. There are a few places that use graphical icons instead of fontawesome alternates which need changing. The star ratings were a challenge last time I tried replacing those, I hope to succeed eventually.

Did I already mention my interest to make these forums lynx-friendly? I am not sure how easy it would be to adapt the present structure that our current Experimental Ganz großes Kino theme uses, but it will likely be less work to redesign from scratch, such as the planned 'departure' theme. Ultimate names of each have not been pondered, not even vague ideas for names as yet.. a name is much less important than what it references. :)

 

[Tigersharke]

I think I want to play with creating the "from scratch" theme. Finding the few bits that need fixing in the present Exerimental theme is slightly tedious and a bit less interesting. :)

UPDATE:

'Experimental' is now Ganz großes Kino which in some ways is appropriate because it is not its own theme unfettered by prior themes or encumberances, the phrase I found is described below. A new Experimental will be developed but as it is planned to be a substantial departure from the present, it might not be or not always be an option to choose it. As for the Ganz großes Kino theme, there are still some minor issues to clean/polish but I do not forsee major breakage. The only visible changes yet to be made are to switch things to fontawesome alternatives and color/style consistency. I think I may scrap the idea of playing with the boatload of css files and associated cleanup I mentioned previously.

Ganz großes Kino is a figure of speech and expresses that someone put on a great show. It is also used to describe someone who magnificently failed to accomplish some task. Ziemlich großes Kino is just a big cinema. – Hendrik Vogt
​

Further discussion/changelog for the new theme (Experimental) will have its own thread(s) and this thread will be renamed shortly.

 

[Tigersharke]

I am not sure how many of you use EFF.org's Privacy Badger but I have it installed in my browser and have enabled it lately. This browser addon will add a badger-stopsign icon across the right corner of the twitter and facebook and Googleplus share buttons. This is fine and dandy but it breaks my revised "share this page" CSS for this theme. It has been fixed as best I am able for now. The tweet and facebook like icons are re-positioned inside the box even with the badger icon overlay, and the GooglePlus button has no badger icon (for me).

There are not many things in this theme that need to be revised. I had been attempting to make the alternating greys for rows of forums or threads or any other thing that displays similarly. Unfortunately, in one area it seems to be a combination of two coloration effects while everywhere else I believe is only one "layer" of coloration. All of the Ganz theme variations are usable and complete. I am not sure how many noticed the bright theme hue variant which may not be quite as blindingly bright as 'default' or 'NewStyle' but it is definitely brighter generally and has white background with black text in its thread views and edit boxes.

 

[Tigersharke]

I happened to play with the search function and noticed that the results page had some remnants of Blazing blue and green. This is due to a universal change via built-in style editor for Xenforo and helps me recognize where I have not styled things manually. I am certain that I had removed all references to the variables within the CSS that cause such blatant colors to appear but perhaps any of various updates circumvent local changes, I do not know. Assuming that I have all such instances finally styled manually, I can soon actually remove those variables via the built-in style editor (I believe, as they seem to all be in an "additional css" box of some sort) or I hope so anyhow.

The "Google" image in search results was not very visible, it seems their choice works best on white backgrounds. I chose to use a CSS effect, a style value for images called filter and the value I chose is invert. It appears more visibly on all Ganz themes.

Very shortly I am going to setup a vote so I can have some sort of metric about who uses what theme(s) and which is the one they prefer. This will not cause any of the themes that have been created and/or modified here (Ganz großes Kino, NewStyle, Magical!, default) to become unavailable, no matter the results. There are a couple themes (only XenPress, others disabled) here that have very uncertain usage/utility and knowing whether *anyone* uses them may be helpful.

 

[Tigersharke]

After fighting with the Share This Page box contents so that they would appear as a single row so I could reduce the height of the box, I discovered that EFF.org's Privacy Badger broke that formatting with the icon it overlays onto each social media button. I fixed the privacy badger effect but recently discovered that layout was damaged when privacy badger is not enabled. I have revised the CSS involved once again, I believe that now those buttons appear reasonably well with and without the privacy badger icon overlay.