Themes? About time. (in General)

Hey all. I apologize for the long wait for the new theme engine. Finals will be finished by the end of the week, and then I'll be given a three week break. During that time, I'll likely contact and work with Jonathan and try to get most if not all of it done in one burst.

Also, for you awesome Mac users, there's this nifty nifty app called CSS Edit at www.macrabbit.com . Once I'm done with the theme engine, you can use that app to edit things to your liking. Trust me, it's a FANTABULOUS app, and it's worth playing around with. It'll make theming like... tons easier.

Let the theming begin! ... .. in a week or two.

/me carps PS in delayed gratitude.

Give the man a free tub of body butter.

Yay new themes

Thanx Pixel!!!!!!!!

Hurrah! Fantastic news! Woo wooo!!!

Yay Pixel!

Yay!

So when is the next change month? :p

w00t!
w00t!
w00t!

Alrighty. I talked with Jonathan and showed him the latest build of the HTML/CSS (nearly same as old one, but simplified a bit). Sadly, I just remembered a new way to implement stuff, so I'll have to do some major recoding.

In a jiffy, we'll have a generic "box" class that will allow theme makers to modify a large portion of the website by modifying that one class. Then, each box will also get its own ID, so you can edit each individual section as well.

Just a quick test of the current new engine. Simplified it tons yesterday (well, literally this morning, but whatever). Relatively simple code to restyle the stuff. And no more of those darn table limitations to deal with (shakes fist at Jon)

Are you styling everything with div id's, so that the entire menu system and drop downs can be moved and re-styled or just color, font and background images?

Every single box has its own ID ;)

Please, be conservative when assigning IDs/classes. CSS is smart enough to handle most layouts via cascading and inheritance.

Each and every ID you introduce means that you will need to keep supporting it...

Well, let's put it this way. Most of the classes are just "bigBox" and "box", with each box sometimes having "boxHeader" and "boxContent". Each page has an ID, and each box has an ID. I don't think there's anything wrong with that system.

"Each and every ID you introduce means that you will need to keep supporting it..."

What do you mean by that?

That you can't drop or re-assign IDs at a whim.

Will we still be able to use existing themes, or will it all be starting from scratch?
*Hopes to keep Ultramodern: Blue*

"Each and every ID you introduce means that you will need to keep supporting it..."

That's preposterous. If the layout changes and the id gets dropped, so what? CSS policies won't drop an error for an id that doesn't exist, and it really doesn't take much effort at all to update an older theme.

Your method, Pixel, is fine.

Alrighty guys. I uploaded a few screenshots to my Flickr account. In it are three themes, all with the same HTML, but with different CSS.

A question for bartjan. How would I go about selecting the second class="box" in my css? There's no ID tag, but I think you have a method for doing so with only classes?

It's true that the best CSS designers use no more IDs than necessary.

Hence, box classes ;)

Id's are used to move things around easily in css, while classes are pretty much strictly used for styling only. So, you only need as many Id's as there are separate components or sections you want to be able to move and float around.