Creating Themes from Scratch

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 4:16 am

OK, time for a stupid question.

I'm interested in creating custom themes for my nuke sites instead of always editing someone else's hard work. I've looked around for info. and/or tools on theme creation but always end up at a dead end.

Is there a toolset that theme creators use when creating nuke themes, if so, can someone please provide me with a link to this toolset,

or

is there a default theme that theme creators use from scratch that can be altered and passed off as your own work without legal ramifications?

Again, I've looked high and low for this and really hope it's not a question you've answered a million times or so. I did see a reference to tools and theme creation both here and at phpnuke.org but nothing in the way of concrete; start here, tools and/or tutorials.

Thanks,

Ken

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 9:59 am

I'd assume all the included themes in phpNuke package would be under GPL/GNU. So there would be no legal ramifications. Really even DeepBlue would be fine, however I prefer a theme that uses the header.html, footer.html includes.

Besides the HOWTO on theme structure, I've not seen anything that useful to help you. Modifying an existing theme seems to be the easiest way to get things done

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 4:15 am

So what your saying is that I can basically hack apart deep blue, adjust it in whatever way i see fit and erase all the copyright code at the bottom of the page inserting my own?

This is what concerns me more than anything. I want to create themes because I'm tiring of overhauling other peoples work but I'm not a genious when it comes to .php, .css or .tpl files. I'm mostly wondering what parts of theme coding are universal and what parts are designer specific and what can be used, modified, and copyrighted without me stepping on anyones toes.

Make any sense?

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 7:09 am

From what I understand of the copyright situation, you would need to leave existing copyright info intact but you can add your own.

If you are heavily modifying an existing theme your footer could simply say 'Based on a theme by X'

The problem with theme design is, there are only so many ways to re-invent the wheel, so proving or disproving 'originality' would be a difficult thing in any case.

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 8:05 am

There's no copyright for the DeepBlue theme specifically. But you will have to leave in the phpNuke copyright, unless you get permission from FB to remove it.

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 9:05 am

Quote:

This is what concerns me more than anything. I want to create themes because I'm tiring of overhauling other peoples work but I'm not a genious when it comes to .php, .css or .tpl files. I'm mostly wondering what parts of theme coding are universal and what parts are designer specific and what can be used, modified, and copyrighted without me stepping on anyones toes.

If you see my recent post on trying to develop a css based theme it will partly answer your question. Generally the themes that I have looked at have functions for themeheader, themearticle (puts news articles on a separate page), themeindex (formats news articles on home page), themefooter and themesidebox. Deepblue and Nukenews take different approaches (this is mentioned in the HOWTO) with Deepblue containing the formatting in the theme.php file and Nukenews calling separate html files for various sections of formatting.

The themes that I've looked at contain tables within tables within tables ad nauseum to my taste. The customization that takes place mostly involves how you format the tables and what graphics you put in and perhaps what backgrounds you have sitting behind the page. If you want to see how the theme really works do a view source of a few sample pages and save the results and look at them in an editor.

Themes are heavily dependent on a few functions from mainfile. You'll need to be familiar with those. The most important onces are blocks(), render_blocks(), blockfileinc(), and perhaps headlines(). Adminblock() and userblock() are also called at various points. Try tracing the flow of logic from your theme.php into blocks() and then see where it goes in mainfile. You also need to be familiar with the structure of the blocks table because that determines where individual blocks go on the page (and partly what's in them).

Personally I think the great profusion of themes is mostly a waste of time and effort and results from the poor design of Nuke generally. I'd much rather see something like the styles manager in the Forums where you can change the layout thru a data entry screen by essentially changing parameters that are embedded in a style.

Hope that helps and good luck in your effort.

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:23 pm

Fantastic responses folks. I'll have to do a little bit of work (which I figured on) in order to actually start with theme creation but I can say, I'm way further down the path to creating themes than I was a few days ago.

Thanks for all your help!

Regards,

Ken

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:33 pm

Latly, by copyright info. I'm assuming you mean this as standard footer copyright:

All logos and trademarks in this site are property of their respective owner. The comments are property of their posters, all the rest © 2002 by me.
You can syndicate our news using the file backend.php or ultramode.txt
Web site engine code is Copyright © 2003 by PHP-Nuke. All Rights Reserved. PHP-Nuke is Free Software released under the GNU/GPL license.

+ the 102 x 47 phpnuke web portal system banner.

I've never inteded to remove this because of the legalities involved to do so, plus, it's not fair to all those who put time into developing, modifying and securing it. I only intended to add my credits for theme creation with links back to my site.

Thanks again folks.