ElkArte Community

Elk Development => Theme development => Topic started by: emanuele on July 18, 2014, 04:54:32 am

Title: Experimenting flex
Post by: emanuele on July 18, 2014, 04:54:32 am
Today I'm in an "experiments" mood. :P

What would you think of a theme along the lines of the attached screen? (I used the browser to edit the css and the few html "live", there is nothing yet available (not even the changes I did lol), just a kind of proof of concept. ;))
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: Jorin on July 18, 2014, 04:57:52 am
Hm... No. Where's the topic title, THE most interesting part of the forum index? ;)  In my opinion the topic title vanishes ???  with this theme design.
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: emanuele on July 18, 2014, 05:16:56 am
Well, it would need some "tweaking", for example the subject could take advantage of some padding (top) and maybe a border (bottom) to better separate it from the rest of the stuff (like in the new attach).

Anything that is not title should be less "important".
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: Jorin on July 18, 2014, 05:18:43 am
Maybe it would look much better with the theme variant you use here?
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: CrimeS on July 18, 2014, 05:24:17 am
Wow, it looks really cool. Will you provide this css you have there for better theme development?

I think it would be worth of trying.
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: emanuele on July 18, 2014, 09:52:35 am
ehhh... the (original) css is already gone (I closed the tab since it was passing the threshold of complexity that is achievable within a browser).
Actually that last version requires few changes to the markup as well, so I'll try and see what I can do.
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: emanuele on July 19, 2014, 06:00:10 pm
Okay, I put together something.
It's a custom.css so it could be used as such putting the file into the css directory of a theme if it is based on the default (light variant).
Actually is a bit fragile because I was too lazy to change the template file, so it's rather hackish, though it should give the general idea of how it works. ;)

And actually, reading what I just wrote, I started wondering how difficult would be to allow create "mixable" themes.
What I mean? Let's say structure and styles are completely separated, it would be possible to pick a theme structure (any theme structure) and mix it with any other color scheme available around. Yeah, an ideal world, but it would actually be rather cool I think. :P
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: CrimeS on July 19, 2014, 06:19:26 pm
Thank you! There are some issues with it when there are for example 3 or less topics to display, but it is a really good step to make ElkArte themes very customisable and unique.
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: emanuele on July 19, 2014, 06:36:12 pm
Yep.
I didn't spend much time thinking about how to fix the edge cases, and honestly I don't even know if it is possible at all...

A similar scheme I think could work well for the board index, so that any board is a "block" and multiple blocks can stay side by side (two , three or more on the same line, etc.). I'm not sure it works so well for the topics. I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work for the messages. :P
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: CrimeS on July 19, 2014, 06:53:58 pm
The board index is a really good idea.
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: emanuele on December 09, 2014, 04:20:49 pm
I know the topic is months old and the "subject" doesn't even match, but who cares, let's say this is my topic about theme experiments. :P

Playing with the display of messages.
I'm not entirely happy with it, though I like it. 8)

ETA: forgot to say that the warnings are able to expand via css.

ETA2: for the moment it's almost all css, just a theme edit because I'm too lazy to change theme.js, but this will change... at some point :P
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: Jorin on December 09, 2014, 11:42:13 pm
I don't like it.  :-[  I can't see with a glimpse where one post begins and another ends.
Title: Re: Experimenting flex
Post by: emanuele on December 10, 2014, 04:45:26 pm
That's something I still have to work on, I'm not even sure how it works without avatar and without signature, etc.
There are so many variants... :-\