Hi yoDan

First of all, I like your work on PWG templates very much.

I had a conversation with Zorglub about templates i did for the 1.3 branch (never publiquely released :-(
and he told me about your work. The goal is the same and i thought about building 1.4 version of my templates and themes.
If you'd like I could rather give you a hand on packaging your clear2 template. It'll be a very good base to buil my own templates.

Just make your work available for me "as is" and tell me what you are not working on now.
I understand reading this thead that you made some changes on the PHP code too. If you have not packaged a MOD yet, jut give the files, i'll do a diff and will make the MOD.

Regards

Christophe

This work generated a few private emails, until zorglub (himself!) asked us to go public. So I am just pasting here one of my series of interrogations. It is late, so I am going to leave it in French. ;-)

Deja, pour les tetes brulees, j'ai mis mon travail ici : http://yo.dan.free.fr/tmp/clear2.tgz

L'archive contient un fichier de PWG modifie (functions_html.inc.php) et le repertoire du template, lui-meme etant le repertoire clear avec quelques fichiers modifies.

Les pages picture et category devraient etre bonnes (c'etait le but) et completes, je pense. Je n'ai pas pu tester toutes les configurations (comme je l'ai ecrit sur le forum), mais je ne pense pas avoir oublie de "champ".

En revanche, j'ai vu que les modifications (par exemple : changer les noms de classes dans les menus) avaient "casse" les pages admin. C'est la que le courage m'a manque. :) D'autant que je decouvre PWG et que je decouvre qu'il est tres touffu, avec beaucoup d'ecrans : j'imagine que le tpl est long et qu'il y a en plus pas mal de code (X)HTML eparpille dans le code PHP (le {ADMIN_CONTENT}{ADMIN_CONTENT_2} me fait peur).

Mon probleme principal : est-ce que l'on peut faire ce template sans casser la compatibilite avec le code precedent, ou faut-il modifier le code de PWG et forcer une version 1.5 ? De plus, faire sa mise en page en CSS presente des avantages mais demande des connaissances (du CSS tel que defini par le W3C d'abord, et ensuite du CSS tel qu'il est supporte par les navigateurs reels). Ceux qui ont ecrit des templates pour les versions 1.x (x < 5) ne vont peut-etre pas tous reussir a porter leurs templates pour l' (hypothetique) version 1.5. Les bons vieux tableaux et toutes les dimensions en pixels, comme en 1995, c'est moins accessibles (cote visiteur), mais c'est plus facile (cote auteur) ! ;-)

Il faudrait plus de recul, sur le contenu des pages (j'ai souvent eu l'impression qu'il y avait plein d'informations a mettre, alors tout etait empile au centre de la page), sur les templates deja existants (pour voir ceux qui pourraient casser), et sur l'historique de PWG (comment se sont passees les precedentes cassures, quelle evolution est envisagee).

J'attends vos reactions avant de modifier d'autres fichiers tpl. En tout cas, je suis toujours motive pour remanier les pages.
A+

I'm sure Yodan will translate his post to english, I continue this thread in english.

Yodan, I had discussed the following point with Gweltas some times ago : does the administrative section and public section share the same CSS stylesheet? (is it important for designers to modify administration display?). My opinion was clearly to separate : it is totally useless to change administration display. Other very designed famous application (Dotclear for instance) share my opinion. Gweltas did not agree and wanted only one stylesheet. As template responsible, we did as he wanted.

Today, Yodan shows that the most important is public section regarding to presentation. Considering the total silence of Gweltas since 3 months and knowing that he's still alive (activity from him on his website), I take the decision to say OK for breaking presentation between public and admin sections : 2 distinct stylesheets. Anyway, this can be done in template "clear" without doing it in template "default".

HTML code can only be found in template files template/*/**.tpl and in include/functions_html.inc.php for too complex HTML code (requiring recursivity for instance). Nowhere else.

If a template requires modifications in any file outside template directory, then a MOD must be associated to the template. If the modifications can be integrated into the official release, I'll do it.

Creating a template strongly based on CSS (instead of HTML tables) is the right way to go. No worry about templates compatible with previous releases : a standard compliant template worth it. Previous branchs (1.3, 1.4) have created major incompatibilities (1.3 = template system introduction, 1.4 = new template system) and no user send me any threatening letter :-)

My opinion : concentrate on public section with a distinct stylesheet. Make clean and minimalistic HTML, clean CSS. That's the only way (I think) to encourage people to create new templates (in the future, this should only be modified stylesheet and icon set) : in previous branchs there has not been many available templates (but in 1.2, because it was only a set of 10 pictures to modify).

As you can see, I completely agree with chrisaga. If the template is available soon (before the end of august) we could work to make it default template for branch 1.5, couldn't we ?

Hi yoDan
I've done some work too.
Based on your previous dclear template, i've a quite working environement.

about.tpl,
admin.tpl,
category.tpl,
identification.tpl,
profile.tpl

are now rewritten. They are more css based, HTML 4.01 Strict, and CSS valid :-)

Note : only the admin/help.tpl is done, the other admin/*.tpl are not rewritten yet, so only admin->user and admin->instruction can validate

They are table free, except for the table of users in profile.tpl which seems a legitimate table to me.

I've tested with firefox 1.06, Opera v7.54 u2, and IE 6.0 on linux (IE running under wine of course ;-)
Everything works fine except a little misalignement on the preference form under Opera.

It looks very similar to original clear template.

Still to do :
comment.tpl, register.tpl, search.tpl and upload.tpl and the remaining admin/*.tpl which are functional but not good looking.
I've no done any work on install.tpl and upgrade.tpl. It might be worth.
Of course much cleanning (get rid of old css definitions, class and id naming consistency, ...)

You cannot look at it live since I play in my home "sandbox" before releasing it on my site but you can download it at http://www.cepatre.net/tmp/cclear.tgz
(Ididn't modify your include/functions_html.inc.php)

I suggest you take  a look, and if you like it, we could merge our works (I didn't know you were working on it) and finish it.

I think category.tpl and picture.tpl must be improved :
* there is an alignement issue with long category names in category.tpl,
* picture.tpl is still table based (I must port my 1.3 branch tamplate to solve this one)

Quick answer before going to work ;-)

z0rglub wrote:

yoDan wrote:

I would suggest a discussion over the DOCTYPE (Transitional vs. Strict, HTML vs. XHTML). :))

May I let you (yoDan and chrisaga) decide about that ? I would say that HTML strict is better than XHTML transitional, but you're the boss.

I think yoDan konws these matters better than me and I've nothing against HTML strict so let's make it the boss of DOCTYPE  ;-)

z0rglub wrote:

I see you and chrisaga working simultaneously on the template and you got poor tools to do this. Wouldn't it be cool to work directly in CVS

Great ! i've never done that before (since i used older versioning systems on AIX) but I'm on board. Just tell us where to start.

z0rglub wrote:

(goal : clear template release 3 = default 1.5 template) ?

Maybe people could use a knew template on 1.4 branch before 1.5 is released, and maybe after since everybody won't upgrade à once.

z0rglub wrote:

There are very few differences in development branch since release 1.4.0 (last fork point) :

- revisions log for picture.tpl
- revisions log for category.tpl

So it'll be possible to have the template work with both branches

Last thing : i think that you won't have to switch from the current default look to the clear one because it'll be very easy to port the colors and backgrounds on the new template.

Thanks for the explanations, i'll do that.

z0rglub wrote:

The decision to take is "how do we work" ? On a separate "clear" template ? Directly on the very soon obsolete "default" template ? Do you add template "clear" on branch-1_4, finalize it and then work on its adaptation to BSF (for next branch-1_5) ?

I asume that you'd suggest to go for the new default template on BSF.

* First if I do that, it would break the CVS untill every evolution between 1.4 and BSF template are integrated. Is this OK ? Are many people testing the BSF ?
* In the other hand, yoDan did modifications on include/functions_html.inc.php as far as I've checked they don't break the other templates but he suggested there might be others so the default template well be touched.
* Finally I'll be on hollydays from 3rd to 24 of September very far away from my computer and very busy to take pictures to feed my PhpWebGallery. So if the job isn't finished I hope yoDan or somebody could step up.

Could we work on a template "clear" for BSF and then switch to the new default, with old colors and theme or "clear" ones .

While you think, i'm going to set up my sandbox - sorry, my working environement - to play with BSF

OK I've a working BSF sandbox (please zorglub see the install bug I reported).
I can start building the new template from my previous work ...
But not tonight ;-)