Template Development

Kai · Post by **Kai** » Thu May 12, 2005 5:07 pm

Current List
DV8 - Bulldrek
3278 - minimalist/stripped
Kai - Winternight

Per a good suggestion, a whole thread about making new templates :7 If you have one you want to work on, I'll add it to the list. If you see one on the Templates Demo on phpbbhacks.com that you like and you want to try and convince...um...some number of people (10?) that its worth installing, discuss.

Kai · Post by **Kai** » Mon May 16, 2005 7:49 pm

Updates made to the Winternight template in case you coldn't tell, mostly layout tweaks. Still not sure what's up with the topic review issue. Will keep working on things.

Salvation122 · Post by **Salvation122** » Wed May 18, 2005 4:08 pm

Those new icons are about ten thousand times more bearable. Good stuff.

Szechuan · Post by **Szechuan** » Wed May 18, 2005 4:30 pm

Salvation122 wrote:Those new icons are about ten thousand times more bearable. Good stuff.

Yes, thank you. Now if only I could switch templates to see what's up.

Kai · Post by **Kai** » Wed May 18, 2005 5:05 pm

Still need to do readable 'new topic' and etcs, but yes, hated those folders. Szech, we'll work on that for you, you should be able to switch templates

3278 · Post by **3278** » Wed May 18, 2005 9:33 pm

Kai, how big is the database now? I've installed PHPTriad - against my own better judgement, since I keep trying to talk myself out of spending a whole bunch of time working on templates - but I have nothing but a totally vanilla, empty board, and it's hard to do layout for Bulldrek without, you know, Bulldrek. On the other hand, I hate to suck up 700mb of upstream bandwidth from the server. 'Course, I don't hate it that much.

Dennis, how's the rebuilt of [bulldrek] coming? I hear it "can never take more than an evening of work." [Yes, I'm goading you into working faster by capitalizing on our tendency toward friction. Is it working?

]

Kai · Post by **Kai** » Wed May 18, 2005 11:22 pm

The database is currently at 408MB. Unweildingly huge :7

What might be easier is playing with stuff on Openboard, which was always intended as a completely open board both on the admin/db and ftp for anyone to mess with. Due to instabilities on the old server though I'm looking at porting all of WT's sites to Flute this week, which would make encouranging people to uso it a bit silly if its down while the DNS changes :7 I should know toworrow morning if I'll be doing that this week though.

3278 · Post by **3278** » Wed May 18, 2005 11:40 pm

Kai wrote:What might be easier is playing with stuff on Openboard, which was always intended as a completely open board both on the admin/db and ftp for anyone to mess with.

Huh? Openboard? Forgive me; I haven't been following along very closely.

Kai wrote:Due to instabilities on the old server though I'm looking at porting all of WT's sites to Flute this week, which would make encouranging people to uso it a bit silly if its down while the DNS changes :7 I should know toworrow morning if I'll be doing that this week though.

Well, let me know whenever. It's not like I'm going to get a lot of work done this week, anyway, doing bits and pieces here and there before dinner. It'd just be helpful, eventually, to have some kind of environment with lots of posts, lots of sigs, avatars, and so on. Content.

DV8 · Post by **DV8** » Thu May 19, 2005 7:48 am

3278 wrote:Dennis, how's the rebuilt of [bulldrek] coming? I hear it "can never take more than an evening of work." [Yes, I'm goading you into working faster by capitalizing on our tendency toward friction. Is it working? ]

No, not quite. I've been very busy lately so I haven't been able to spend any time on it. I'll admit that it's going to take more than an evening's of work, but that's more because, well, I want to change some things.

Kai · Post by **Kai** » Thu May 19, 2005 2:24 pm

Bah, can't find the post...like forever and ever ago in the days of the Control Group, I set up a board called OpenBoard and posted all the info to get into the FTP and the database password, etc as a tool for people to learn how to code in phpBB and it went largely unused except for myself

I updated it to 2.0.14 and at least Deev's using it for dev work now.

I'll post details like this weekend as I got confirmation and the info needed to start migrating the rest of the WT sites over to the new server, so there will be some DNS delays on things for a few days.

3278 · Post by **3278** » Thu May 19, 2005 4:13 pm

Excellent. Well, let us know what the details are when it's all worked out, and I can do my final tweaking there. I suspect it'll be weeks or months before I'm anything like done, anyway, since this week's "rain" is likely to give way to next week's "summer," so it's not as if there's a rush on my account.

3278 · Post by **3278** » Thu May 19, 2005 4:17 pm

DV8 wrote:I'll admit that it's going to take more than an evening's of work, but that's more because, well, I want to change some things.

You'll have to! It wasn't until I started looking at the templates again that I realized how much of what I did relied on underlying code changes. So much is set in the lang files that layout without recourse to altering them is much more complex. [stripped], for instance, would be flat-out impossible without code changes, since many of the images are set in the php for each or the lang files, instead of in the template where they belong. Looks like some of that's changed since 2.0.1 or whenever I first built [stripped], but it's still horribly crippling when trying to make an ultra-minimalist interface.

Fortunately, I have another option: since the template I'm making doesn't have to be the default, and no one has to use it, I can simply remove functionality and not be worried about it; if people don't like it, they can use a different theme! Not an option I had, originally. It's liberating.

Kai · Post by **Kai** » Thu May 19, 2005 5:49 pm

Yeah, there was a weird swing there in regards to the templates from 2.0 to 2.0.15, from 'should never touch the code' to 'most things shouldn't, but update the language files' onto 'templates are an integral part of the code, change whatever' and then major security problems made them realize 'okay, yes, we were right the first time, templates shouldn't touch code'

Its hard, too, since I'm used to writing hacks, been pounded into my head eight billion times that Thou Shalt Not Fuck With The Template And Make It Hard On The User, so keep wanting to push changes into the code :7