phpnuke themes are rubish!

Regular Joined: Oct 15, 2005 Posts: 80

Well they are Surprised

It's amazing how crap some of the new ones being made are, It's the year 2006 with many talented artists out there on the net, and the phpnuke community get templates that look like they have been made by a 2 year old kidd in play school.

The only place that I can think of that makes good looking templates is Xtrato, they look like alot of work has been put in, but they arnt THAT GREAT, and I wouldn't say they are worth the money, but they are still the top of the pile for work gone into nuke themes.

Most people, like this site my own site and many others ... just want a clean no fuss portal template, but there are lots of sites that want it to be abit more flash like gaming sites, and yes there are places that do them but you have to buy them and tbh they arnt worth paying for, they still look very basic.

I just find it odd with many talented artist out on the net doing other free art there are not that many putting work into these templates, after all it's an amazing way to get your name out there as an net artist.

Oh well I guess phpnuke is getting old and that's the way things go. Crying or Very sad

Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 10:57 pm

Well, I am certainly no artist, but I would also like to see someone take up the charge to give nuke a "new look".... and 100% strict W3C and CSS compliance wouldn't be all that bad either. Wink

Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 10:57 pm

Ooohhhh, I forgot XHTML too!

registered · Theme Guru Joined: Nov 01, 2003 Posts: 1006

Quote:

Well they are

It's amazing how crap some of the new ones being made are, It's the year 2006 with many talented artists out there on the net, and the phpnuke community get templates that look like they have been made by a 2 year old kidd in play school.

The only place that I can think of that makes good looking templates is Xtrato, they look like alot of work has been put in, but they arnt THAT GREAT, and I wouldn't say they are worth the money, but they are still the top of the pile for work gone into nuke themes.

Most people, like this site my own site and many others ... just want a clean no fuss portal template, but there are lots of sites that want it to be abit more flash like gaming sites, and yes there are places that do them but you have to buy them and tbh they arnt worth paying for, they still look very basic.

I just find it odd with many talented artist out on the net doing other free art there are not that many putting work into these templates, after all it's an amazing way to get your name out there as an net artist.

Oh well I guess phpnuke is getting old and that's the way things go

what alexwise considers putting work into something and what others consider putting work into something are not likely the same thing. If people were not pleased with the themes being made no one would be buying them. No matter the theme it takes a certain amount of work to get one made. Just because your taste is not that of somoene else doesn't mean that their work is crap.

You mentioned free. I suppose that you are willing to spend a few days if not a week of your time to create something fantastic for people to take for free, correct? I mean, the work involved is huge and then the reward is nothing. People will hack it apart, take your name off of it, alter the images so that it doesnt even reflect your work, or sell it out from under you. That is not something that I or many others are willing to do. That would be the same as if you work on something, release it hoping to get recognition and someone else claims it. Most of us are too busy to spend that kind of time for nothing.

If you are so very displeased with them. If they are all crap. Then by all means, learn how to make your own and dazzle us with your brilliance. Since you are the loudest critic then please do something to change it instead of just bi***ing about the situation with no constructive ideas on fixing it. Rolling Eyes

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

i sure understand what alexwise means or wanna say but agree on jaded to... Laughing

if you can do better then go ahead.
but that doesnt mean nobody can speak up...

so question is,why are the designs of phpnuke themes in a way that not many like them...?
I dont have the answer...
I do feel that there are great themes for postnuke....

And why people spend so much money on a theme that is dark colored ,has flash and looks a lot like the rest..
Not to mention that most commercial themes can be downloaded on certain sites...

If you look around or read the news you see that every minute 100 themes are "created ".. killing me

and in 10 colors....

Im never satisfied with themes,not even my own...yes i accept it for now but when i see something better i kick it out again....

But it would have been better to start this topic in the rant forum...

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2006 9:48 am

Quote:

If you look around or read the news you see that every minute 100 themes are "created "..
and in 10 colors....

well, I have never actually done that hit but I know what you mean. I think that a lot of theme makers make one theme. Then they alter the colors hoping that it will be usable by more people. I simply believe that most theme makers are trying to appeal to a large range of people so they make a general theme. They take the requests of others and do the best that they can.

I rarely make a public one for that reason. I prefer the custom work that way people are getting exactly what they want. To each his own I suppose. A theme can only be made so many ways. It is all up to personal choice at a certain point. Not everyone likes my work but then again many love it. It comes to personal choice again. I think that everyone is entitled to their own views but I stand by my first post here. Dance-Y

people make flash themes ( which tend to be heavy loading)
themes with alternating headers or blocks (mine is)
themes will a fixed width
themes with a full width
themes with no spacing in them
themes with a lot of spacing
themes with a "frame" around them
themes with single news or double news
marquees and java scripts in them
left and right blocks on the same side
themes with no side blocks
themes with different right and left blocks
css driven themes
themes with image defined tables

I dont know what more can really happen aside from Montegos suggestion. However my challenge to alexwise still goes. Dazzle us with your brilliant theme making skills. I will await that with bated breath.

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2006 10:36 am

Moved to Rants forum.

Site Admin Joined: Jun 04, 2004 Posts: 6432

Gee...I thought the user name jaded represented a color, rather than a state of mind... Smile

But the point is well taken: put up or shut up.

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2006 1:45 pm

lol kguske, exactly. There is no point to say publicly something is crap and name a company in your example without some semblance of an idea on how to fix it or the ability to do it yourself. Smile

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2006 3:35 pm

I reserved my opinion in that I only have one theme I've ever "alter" in which I left the credits to the original theme designer in it.

Now as for this topic.
I have spent weeks getting the theme the way I'd like it. although, problem is nuke has a layout, left and right blocks sitting on top of easchother, width is left upto the way the block works with the theme. Now knowing this, and a few other things, like flash is more for attracting a type of person to pay for the theme, do you still stand by and say ALL themes are crap?

I'm just curious bout why you would say such a thing. If in your opinion it doesnt work for your site, then perhaps others will agree. simply put, themes are made to work with nuke, and made for customers who want them, opinions are great but to insult theme designers is not, ecspecially with Jaded around, if you didnt know already Wink

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2006 4:01 pm

Quote:

I have spent weeks getting the theme the way I'd like it

Ha...ha... a good designer is never satisfied...
ok you never said your a designer... Laughing

registered · Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2006 6:59 pm

Theme's will always suck while:

- browser wars are still ongoing
- 1 of 4 men are colorblind in some way
- US government pushes section 508
- W3C keeps innovating and setting WAI-AA
- IE lost the battle so that flash is crap
- Adobe is pushing rubbish toolbars with all software
- nuke themers lack knowledge (not all but most of them)
- no ISO 17799 compliance

If you think that you don't belong to those crappy themers then you should explain in here (without googling) what WAI-AA and 508 contain.
ISO 17799 is something FB or Raven's team should know about.

the fact is that phpnuke is designed by a homeuser for homeusers, and with homeuser i mean someone that has/had no knowledge whatsoever about the internet but wanted a website to show the world what they believe in or like to play.
So most phpnuke users (not counting skilled peeps like raven and bob) are people who take their first steps on the net thru their FPS, RPG, RS, FS or other network gameplay or sport or religion. You hardly have knowledge and find out about HTML, JavaScript and imaging to create a design for your game.

So you could all keep complaining about the crappy themes, but nobody stands up and creates one the right way. And if they did everyone complains that they all use the same theme/layout.

Dragonfly/CPG is not different here since most people design the same themes as well. But if you look around you will find websites that are not YAW (yet another website) as seen on [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]

A real designer has to deal with many more aspects then the ones i mentioned above, so shut up with complaining and either pay kaching!

$ for a real designer or live with the fact that it is designed by a noob who is proud on his work and should be respected.

Posted: Sat Jul 08, 2006 10:11 pm

ok, I understood bout none of that ROTFL

Except for the part where dj said pay for a REAL designer or shut up.

(I'm one of those noobs) ROTFL

I think the key is respect.

People work hard to create things, period.
If you dont like it, thats an opinion and what was stated was stated as fact.
Sorry but thats NOT fact and should not be stated in the manor in which it was, and like everyone has said, you dont like it, do something to change your circumstances. Pay for it, make it, Just dont make a complaint a statement of fact!

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 4:46 am

well people are free to complain....
complaining is infact the same as feedback,nice or not...without feedback developers dont know how everybody feels...

that someone isnt capable of creating its own theme doesnt mean he cant complain or say anything about its design.

if someone hears a song and he doesnt like it he can say that it sucks,but thats just for him.....another person could say ...he that sounds great...
its all personal.....

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 5:30 am

saying "rubbish" without some positive energy is complaining and not feedback.

A rant & rave like: "your theme sucks, read this and that so you can learn about standards"
is way more a 'positive complaint'

Just saying rubbish without providing any feedback is just stupid. Now that's my opinion Smile

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 7:48 am

ah but not every developer / designer is gonna like the idea that someone without any knowledge is gonna tell him (how nice it may sound) what is wrong or what should be improved.

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 8:10 am

Good move, "G", on moving this to the "Rants and Raves" forum! :rotlf:

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 8:31 am

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 9:44 am

yeah guardian....wonder where you got that idea from... killing me

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 3:22 pm

I would disagree with the premise of this thread, that Nuke themes are rubbish, and I'd say that I think that themes like fisubice which we use by default on this site, are quite good. Nevertheless I'd also say that I think that the basic theme architecture, while not rubbish, should be seriously reworked for some future release of Nuke.

Inhttp://www.ravenphpscripts.com/posts7990-highlight-.htmlI proposed and developed a theme that didn't rely on tables at all. I had it working on my production site for a few months ... it wasn't perfect but it worked. Unfortunately, it depended on modifications to the core Nuke programs and when I got caught up in working on Ravennuke I had to abandon work on the theme in order to stay consistent with releases of RN. Someday I hope to persuade the Ravennuke team to incorporate my changes but I haven't done all my homework yet and am not ready for that step.

Later, as part of trying to fix some themes I took a good hard look at the css files that come with the standard themes (there's about 12 of them in Ravennuke). Basically what I found is that there is enormous duplication and overlap in these css files and that if you "factored out" the common css statements into a single common css file you could reduce individual themes to one or two (or in some cases zero) css statements. The advantage: an individual theme designer could look at what the common css statements did and then only focus on differences. I had this approach running on my test site too and it worked well, but again I temporarily ditched it to maintain compatibility with Ravennuke.

I've just finished working on some fixes for the themefooter function in a couple of themes and while working on that what occurs to me is that there is similar duplication and overlap in all of the theme functions. Now I really haven't done my homework on this but what I'm wondering is whether we couldn't develop some "common" functions (dare I mention "objects") that a theme designer could use. Then just override the parameters that need to be overridden to give a theme individuality.

For those who really want to explore and contribute you could also look at how the bulletin board software uses the bbthemes table to store css settings that in turn are used in the style. Something like this could possibly be used in a future Nuke, though I have reservations about making this dynamic because of the overhead that would be incurred. But perhaps having the theme or css settings stored in a table that a theme designer could use to to generate a "static" css file that would be used would be a good compromise.

In short if you want to get this topic moved out of rants and raves then do some serious homework about themes, take a look at what exists, read up on your PHP textbooks and come up with an approach that really does something good.

Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 6:38 pm

wow...nice typing fkelly,but as talk with many people from differnt countries i can say one thing....the majority doesnt give a s... about about how themes look,if its valid html,compliant etc...
just a handfull like the idea of going valid,thats it...
nobody even cares about loading time of a flash theme....
8 out of 10 wants a nice site with a very nice theme and all the rest doesnt matter...
and a few years ago i already noticed that developers have their own "phpnuke standards" of making things...
And we still see that with certain themes that dont fit ,or shows a messed up table layout ,or things that dont show....
in holland we allways say...if you want it done right....do it yourself...
and thats what i do.....making my own theme....would take me hours and hours.....but it keeps me off the streets... Laughing

Regular Joined: Mar 11, 2005 Posts: 67

I'll reopen this topic again.

I've been searching for good site where you can get free themes, but all I found were those monstertemplates. Ok I could pay 50 bucks for those themes, but don't tell me that people are not willing to make free tempaltes.

Have you seen free templates for Wordpress? They are all for free... [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]

Do you know any good website, where you can find "hightech" templates for Php-nuke like those for Wordpress?

Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 4:09 pm

A 'theme' is not the same as a 'template' so I guess you'll need to decide *which* of those you are looking for.

Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 4:07 am

Could you be so kind and explain what's difference betweek template and theme for Php-nuke?

Posted: Fri Dec 08, 2006 7:21 am

no offense Lucifix but your question has nothing really to do with this topic. It might have been better to make a new one instead of reopening this one from july which was about whether a nuke theme was rubbish or not. There are many places to find free nuke themes. Search google for nuke themes, then check the sites that show up.