ElkArte Community

Extending Elk => Custom Themes => Topic started by: Jorin on October 15, 2015, 03:31:30 am

Title: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 15, 2015, 03:31:30 am
You maybe noticed sometimes I am creative and have my moment.  :D  I did today, so I asked myself: What could a modern theme look like? And here's the result.

I can't create this theme because of lacking skills. If anyone wants to work with me on a theme kind of this please feel free to ask. Please do not copy this draft or elements out of it for your own theme and then say: "Hey, look, I did this all by myself, isn't it a real beauty?" That would be rude!  ::)

I can make more. The board index, the profile page, etc., if you wish.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: CrimeS on October 15, 2015, 04:24:46 am
Few months ago I was playing around with similar boardindex layout. I also had 3 columns to display boards etc. That's actually a really nice design you did there!
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 15, 2015, 04:27:58 am
3 columns? Is there a screenie anywhere? Sounds interesting.

Thank you very much!  :)
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: CrimeS on October 15, 2015, 04:49:17 am
I'll send a screenshot later (however it's from SMF version,  Elkarte should be even easier). There is a main category for a full width and 3 columns of boards under it. They also change to 2 and 1 columns,to comply with responsiveness,  depending if they have enough space.

There was plan to give that choice in my newest theme, but I'm not ready to launch it yet, still beta status if you like.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 15, 2015, 04:53:09 am
Quote from: CrimeS – There is a main category for a full width and 3 columns of boards under it. They also change to 2 and 1 columns,to comply with responsiveness,  depending if they have enough space.

Sounds good!  :)
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Joshua Dickerson on October 15, 2015, 05:33:51 am
What fonts are you using? Looks great.

I'd be interested to see it fleshed out a little more. The menu and the infocenter at the bottom look nice but I'm not really sure if they would match with what the actual features are. Interested to hear/see what you think. Also, some other pages like the profile, message index, and topic display would be nice to see.

Did I say it looks great?
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 15, 2015, 06:12:09 am

It's Segoe UI (https://www.microsoft.com/typography/Fonts/family.aspx?FID=331).

Quote from: Joshua Dickerson – I'd be interested to see it fleshed out a little more. The menu and the infocenter at the bottom look nice but I'm not really sure if they would match with what the actual features are. Interested to hear/see what you think. Also, some other pages like the profile, message index, and topic display would be nice to see.

You're right, this theme would not work with the actual ElkArte. For example the "NEW (2)" menu button at the top. There could be all new things listed the (logged in) user should know about: new topics, new answers to his posts, new messages, new mentions and new users. Maybe new polls too, if we see polls not as "posts with a little poll attached" but as "polls with an explaining post", which I would prefer. Maybe this needs a screenshot to understand what I mean?

I tried to think about what a modern board software should offer. Why not skip some traditional stuff which keeps us back? Why not try to build a board software which combines a forum, a blog, a static website, but keep it easy to administrate and not overloaded with functions - and with focus on discussions!

So this theme has a "WHO WE ARE" page where we can explain who we are and introduce ourself. It can be a text page or a table with informations of the users behind the project. Statistics are not shown at the footer, therefor you must click on the "STATISTICS" button at the bottom, which leads to an extra page with all statistic data you can think of (and want to show others - why not make it possible to choose which statistics are shown there?). The news flash should have small dots at the bottom to skip a news and directly show the next one, I forgot that in my screenshot. You know this from all the websites out there.

Getting an idea what I think of ElkArte could look like in the future? Forget the old ways, try something new. Be the first!  ;)


You did. Thanks!  O:-)
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Joshua Dickerson on October 15, 2015, 07:01:39 am
I like the ideas. Make some more images. It will boost enthusiasm to make new features come to fruition.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 15, 2015, 07:51:16 am

I will.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: CrimeS on October 15, 2015, 07:55:52 am
Here it is, as I said, the columns depend on width:

(http://img.liczniki.org/20150814/1-1439549056.png)

(http://img.liczniki.org/20150814/2-1439549056.png)

(http://img.liczniki.org/20150814/3-1439549056.png)

Plus a topic display (resizes itself like boards):

(http://img.liczniki.org/20150814/4-1439549057.png)
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: emanuele on October 15, 2015, 08:42:45 am
Interesting design!
Ideas are always welcome, and cuts from the past are good as well to me! (I always try to propose new ideas. :P)
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 15, 2015, 09:06:53 am
I know.  :)

I'm one step further, playing with this...
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Flavio93Zena on October 15, 2015, 12:50:02 pm
Do you have any live demo of that theme @CrimeS ? It's rather good, I'd want to see how you coded the board index (I think I know, but there are many possibilities).
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Joshua Dickerson on October 15, 2015, 01:06:39 pm
He's just making images.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: CrimeS on October 15, 2015, 01:14:22 pm
Writing that was more than easy, so you should get the idea :D I think I will rewrite a good bit of code as I'm not happy very happy with it. It's using bootstrap to control the width of elements (I was too lazy to write 4 media queries, and it turned out that I had to customize bootstrap myself, so I didn't plan it out well and created more work for myself). I'll try to recreate this for ElkArte without bootstrap (I don't like bootstrap, but I was told to gain some "skills").

I have an old demo on http://studiocrimes.com/index.php?theme=11
An old one because some parts of code are missing and there's an overflow :) actually SimplePortal is overwriting some classes, so it breaks the boards
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Wizard on October 15, 2015, 01:23:46 pm
I need to understand PHP better before I do something new.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 16, 2015, 04:18:46 am
I started a new topic for Circles.  :D

http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=3016.0
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 16, 2015, 08:19:17 am
Been working on the profile page today. It's a real beauty, you will see. A shame I can't code it.  :'(
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Joshua Dickerson on October 16, 2015, 01:16:35 pm
Can you do HTML/CSS?
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 16, 2015, 11:57:03 pm
Just a little bit. I can read and unterstand the most of the code, but I don't have the knowledge and skills to write this theme.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Joshua Dickerson on October 17, 2015, 12:11:31 am
Damn, it looks awesome but I'm working on making the internals of Elkarte better in addition to a million other things. Slicing up HTML/CSS to get it work with templates would be so easy.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Jorin on October 18, 2015, 03:11:51 am
So easy? Really?
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Joshua Dickerson on October 18, 2015, 03:20:44 am
lol, the hard part is the CSS and HTML. PHP is easy compared to CSS. Now, I'm not at all sure about what you want to do with Javascript, so that might be different.
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: Bloc on October 18, 2015, 06:09:32 am
Neither is "easy" - its just what you spent most time with, they are all languages.

Now, design is a whole other matter. Using graphic previews is actually the best way to work with themes as it makes your creative side work for you, not your logic. Though you need a certain skill in the handling the graphic program...

Very nice design preview for elkarte btw. :)
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: CrimeS on October 18, 2015, 06:39:08 am
If you know how the boxes work and you can float them with changing the width then you should be fine to code that. In most of the cases you can do very much with css without touching the actual code part.

This can be done with adding few lines of css code:
Title: Re: What a modern ElkArte theme could look like
Post by: wintstar on October 18, 2015, 08:41:00 am
Think in the emergence of the theme that it is also visible clear in the mobile view.