I have actually started work on a Bootstrap based "Default" theme.

The idea is that it would act as a parent theme and allow others to create child themes off it and be able to theme Bootstrap (which of course is used on 100,000's of sites and many are familiar with it) or modify my templates to create modern and responsive themes (again with the familiarity of Bootstrap).

Ideally I would have liked to have made the theme customisable within the admin area, but as this isn't supported by Piwigo I suppose this could be done later as a plugin.

I think I'm probably beginning to see why Piwigo is not a popular option to create themes for as it's not exactly the easiest system to work with.

A few of my observations:

* Excessively fragmented templates, I don't feel that these are optimal when creating themes.
* Completely undocumented variables.
* Inconsistent naming conventions of variables.
* Variables are not consistently available in all templates, e.g. $GALLERY_TITLE is null within menubar.tpl so trying to create a navbar like http://getbootstrap.com/components/#navbar for example you have to resort to hacks to simply have the gallery title in there.
* Plugin logic is embedded in the themes in various places, there are a lot nicer ways this could have been done.

Of course much of this could come down to personal preference, also it probably doesn't help that I've just finished working on some Ghost theme customisations and the Ghost theme engine is very quick and simple to use.

Anyway back to the topic...

I will open source my efforts, once complete, and I'm going to try and port my blog theme over as well. The base theme will probably be ready in a day or two so I'll post a link.

Last edited by philb (2014-09-03 01:29:11)

flop25 wrote:

yes template variables have a scope limited to the template itself

that's not true,

but it all depends in which order templates are parsed
in this case menubar.tpl is parsed before the include of page_header.php, then variables declared in page_header are not available yet

thats pretty bad, all of this would need a refactoring (it's part of [Bugtracker] ticket 3107)

flop25 wrote:

I suggest you to use our deposit SVN so we could help too

I have what I have done so far on Github, but it's not a lot yet, mainly just nav.

Repo: https://github.com/Philio/BootstrapDefault
Demo: http://bootstrapdefault.phil.si/

Can someone give me an example of when these variables get populated and why?

* $header_msgs
* $theSwiftHeader
* $header_notes

They always appear to be null/empty. Didn't get round to checking the code yet, hoping someone knows!

I was really wondering if they were deprecated as I'm getting messages populated in the $errors and $infos arrays just fine.

I'll have a look in the code later.

What I mean is, I was wondering if they were used as messages seem to be populated via $infos and $errors.

However, I ran grep on the source (as I only added the theme directory to the IDE) and can see that there are some uses.

$header_msgs seems to be used for severe/fatal errors:

include/common.inc.php:  $header_msgs[] = l10n('Bad status for user "guest", using default status. Please notify the webmaster.');
include/common.inc.php:  $header_msgs[] = l10n('The gallery is locked for maintenance. Please, come back later.');
include/common.inc.php:    $header_msgs[] = 'Some database upgrades are missing, '

$header_notes seems to be user configurable and used by filtering.

Benoît wrote:

Given the huge amount of open source work so far on this projet, I do not think money for coding is the main motivation. But of course I may be wrong.

for my personal case, you are totally right :-)

An intresting treat. I am althought convinced, that the basic code of piwigo is superb and it is underselling itself with its default design.
I can not code but could bring in some design ideas and some money, if somebody would like to code a new theme.
I think Modus started already with some modern design.  Maybe we could use this as base to start.
I use modus at www.bilderlager.ch/test_bilderlager and like the features, that you can change colors etc..

danibo

Last edited by danibo (2015-02-20 11:19:09)