Theme hunting

registered · Worker Joined: Jul 06, 2005 Posts: 172

I need to go theme hunting today. Fisubice is nice and clean, but font sizes are restrained. So either I need to remove the restraint (I have no idea how/where it is), or I need to find another theme.

Anyone have a list of themes that seem to work nicely with RN? It would be nice to see the whole nuke community get behind RN and stop theming for FB's work Razz

But anyways -- just wondering what the deal is with other themes. Do most work? Most not work? Can I remove the restraint for fisubice? Help would be MUCH MUCH MUCH appreciated, as I have to launch a very important website tonight. I'd like to get the theme taken care of first thing. Thanks!~!!

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 11:05 am

It is indeed possible to change font sizes by tweaking the CSS. See themes/fisubice/style/style.css.

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 12:01 pm

Thanks, chief. I'll just stick with fisubice for now -- I don't have time to delve into a whole new theme.

Is there a way to specify the size you want, but leave it open so that it's not restrained? How can i make it so it doesn't ignore font size I specify in stories and elsewhere?

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 1:34 pm

This is being actively discussed somewhere else, but try this. In the fisubice style.css file, the first line looks like this:

Code:




font {font-family: Verdana,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10px}

Change it to this:

Code:




font {font-family: Verdana,Helvetica,sans-serif;}

That seems to allow the WYSIWYG font sizes to take effect.

Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 8:51 pm

Is there a list somewhere of RN-compatible themes?

Posted: Tue Jul 17, 2007 9:09 pm

Raven nuke is compatible with any standard php-nuke theme.

Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2007 2:28 am

Oh, oh. The most standard themes have small errors, hardcoded parts, missing language defines and are not XHTML valid Smile

And it seems theme creators don´t check for such things. I have found errors wich are in themes since there since the earliest versions of PHP Nuke.

We have checked all themes in RavenNuke for such things.
I´m sure FKelly can you tell more about that.
I prefer fisubsice for all my sites.
So when you ever buy a theme you should have an option to give back. Thats my opinion about that.
Btw: Theme creator wich have hundred of validation errors on her index page you should ignore.

Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2007 11:21 am

The problem you allude to in fisubice was fixed for the RN2.10.01 patch release. You could get the style.css for that or you could make the patch yourself that Susann suggested. It is under discussion whether we will make the same change to the remaining themes for the next patch release.

There is a sticky posting out on the status of themes as of the 2.10 release. A number were fixed to be 100% HTML 4.01 compliant. Some still are not.

As far as themes go, my opinion (and this is just my personal 2 cents) is that almost all Nuke based themes are pure junk. There is a lot of eye candy in some of them but there are all sorts of compliance issues, tables and trs and tds that aren't closed, input tags that aren't closed, attributes that aren't quoted and the like. And beyond that, the basic theme architecture (and this is still true in RN 2.10) leads to repetition of the same styles in style.css files of every theme and to repetition of logic within the theme functions. My recommendation: go find my sticky post and stick with one of the RN themes that's compliant.

Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2007 6:16 pm

It isn't that difficult to achieve 4.01 compliancy.

I just did a client site and they wanted the homepage to be 4.01 compliant using RavenNuke and a Warcraft theme, here is the result of the check

WC3 Compliance Check

It is a pretty graphic intensive theme and it still validates. Smile

It just takes a little more time to make sure you use valid markup and to fix a few of the included blocks.

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:26 am

Quote:

It isn't that difficult to achieve 4.01 compliancy.

Well we could be looking at a glass half full, half empty analogy. When I was doing the RN themes last January and February it took probably a day per theme once I got in the hang of it. Of course I had Susann finding little bugs and we fixed a lot of other things that had nothing to do with compliance. Like using constants consistently thru the themes. And again, it's maybe just my personal disposition but it just doesn't make sense to have to make essentially the same changes to a whole bunch of themes which repeat about 90% of the same code. That's why people invented functions and objects. Look at themearticle and themeindex in 100 themes and you'll probably find 100 repetitions of the same mind numbing logic.

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:32 am

Honestly I don't want to sound like an advertisement here but with the AutoTheme module this is taken care of by the fact that you only have to code the html portion of the theme, all of the code and functions are standardized in the backend module code.
And it is already 4.01 compliant along with 4.01 strict if you want that as well.

The biggest issues I have seen with getting a site compliant is when the client wants to use a certain module or block that is poorly coded, I see this all the time with other Nuke forks but I RARELY see it with RavenNuke. Which is why once I discovered RavenNuke I immediately started recommending it to any of my clients or friends that were looking to use Nuke.

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 11:45 am

Thanks for that information. I will have to explore the Autotheme module. Does it use the html files as separate files and do an eval on them? We eliminated the evals from most themes as part of RN 2.10 (but not from fisubice). There are efficiency reasons for eliminating evals (there's an article somewhere on the web about the efficiency of eval) and also it was hard to make some of the constants work properly if they were part of a html file that was eval'd. But again thanks and I will look into your suggestion ... as time permits.

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:11 pm

Not sure about the eval part but there is no slowdown when using it, and it actually offers a ton more options for themes. For a complete list of features you can read

AutoTheme features

It is on the PostNuke site but the feature set is the same on any of the Nuke systems.

It really makes themes clean and very easy to use/customize.

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:38 pm

On first read that is very impressive. If it works as advertised I could even see replacing the whole theme non-system of PHPnuke with something like this. But of course there's many a slip between cup and lip and it will take some time to evaluate.

Oops, just clicked around some more and it is not free and not, by implication at least, Open Source. At first glance I don't see how we could ever incorporate it into a free product like Ravennuke.

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 2:07 pm

No no... There are 2 versions, AT Lite .87 which is GPL and FREE and then AT 1.77 which is the commercial version, the free version is the one I linked to earlier and has all of those capablilities.

Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2007 2:35 pm

Sorry then, my mistake. I will take a look at this as time permits. I have to say that the documentation is very impressive. So many of these products have little or no documentation and you can't really even tell what the product does without installing it and trying it. So it makes a good first impression when you have a simple description, as Autotheme does and back that up with a solid user manual. Thanks for correcting me.