Boxed In: 4 themes

[laitaine]

An embarrassingly long time ago, I submitted a layout and a bunch of themes and decided I wanted to use it as a learning experience for patching styles. A few small things got in the way (like finishing my thesis, packing up my life and moving to another country) but, finally, finally - thanks to much patience and hand-holding from ninetydegrees - I'm about done with patching! Of course, I probably could have done it a whole lot quicker if I hadn't kept tweaking the layout under the guise of "testing". Or tweaking themes. Or making new ones. I guess this is an unfortunate side effect of patching my own stuff.

Anyway, before I put the patches up on zilla, I thought I'd post the new themes here:

Layout: Boxed In
Author: laitaine

Amethyst · info · source · preview

Mint Choc Chip · info · source · preview

Oceana · info · source · preview

Spring Fling · info · source · preview


I also tweaked all the Boxed In themes I submitted previously, and renamed two of them:
Rose -> Antique Rose
Silver -> Silver Spectrum


Image info:
- The background images were purpose made by me and are released under the terms of my CLA.
- The arrow and tag icons are recoloured versions from the FamFamFam Silk set, the originals are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. I don't know the ins and outs of licensing, especially as I've not made these graphics myself, only altered someone else's work - but I'm sure original license + CLA makes everyone happy. Also, as the site already uses some silk icons, do I need to add this link to the layout's resources, or is it taken care of elsewhere?

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

You mean there are icons which never change?

[laitaine]

Yes. There are 7 icons which are added in the layout layer and do not change (these are for metadata and also alongside the permalink, reply and read-comment links).

Though, I guess there's nothing to stop any theme makers from coming along and changing them to their own icons or setting them to "" (ie. effectively removing them).

There are then 7 further new icons added for each theme layer - these are a tag icon for each tag in tags lists and arrows to go alongside parent/thread/expand/etc links in comments.

[ninetydegrees]

Hmm. I think I still would put everything in themes even if it's redundant and add coding lines.

[laitaine]

Ah, okay, so I would have 14 icons per theme, instead of 7 icons per theme and 7 icons for the layout?

I add the images by making them the background image for a particular element, then increase the padding so the text doesn't overlap. With no images I guess there will be funky spaces. Should I move that css into the theme layers as well?

And would it be good for me to upload the patch to bugzilla as it is so far so people can see what I've done and can make specific comments?

[ninetydegrees]

The way I see it this is very close to Skittlish Dreams (http://www.dreamwidth.org/customize/advanced/layersource?id=83797&fmt=html) where I think Fu had to create an option to turn off the images in themes which didn't have them. If I want to create a theme for Boxed In but don't want to make images for it for whatever reason or don't want to use the existing ones it seems to me I should be able to and the layout should look fine without them (and no the CSS doesn't have to go into the themes but, if you create a prop letting your turn the images on/off, you can a variable dependent on this prop which would insert the necessary CSS, the way we often do with icon positioning). This is why I think everything should go into the themes, credit included, but I see Denise and Fu think otherwise.

And would it be good for me to upload the patch to bugzilla as it is so far so people can see what I've done and can make specific comments?

Yep!

[laitaine]

Making the images optional is a really good idea. I like that. I've uploaded my patch so far WITHOUT this included so people can see what I've got, but I'll add this in.

Though I'm still thinking it might be good to make a default icon set for people that would like to make Boxed In themes and don't want to make their own images but would like to use images. So I'd have:

layout: [default icon set]
theme: [optional theme-specific icon set]

So the theme can optionally override the default images. But the images only show up at all *if* the use_images tag is set.

Or is this too complicated?

[ninetydegrees]

So the theme can optionally override the default images. But the images only show up at all *if* the use_images tag is set.

I think this is very smart actually, especially since I've noticed some images actually replace text (metadata headers right?) so it could be problematic for some people. It would be great to make everything display as usual for people who have images off. I think this could be easily done using function prop_init.