Hi Team, some more theme changes I'm thinking about for Roller 5.1, I'm
not definite on any of these, just soliciting opinions:
1.) Retiring the Sotto theme -- while pretty it's non-responsive and
doesn't offer anything that Fauxcoly doesn't have, and the latter has
more functionality and uses a more modern rendering framework. And
Sotto's margins are not wide enough to support blogging Java or other
software programs, the primary need I can see for a non-responsive theme.
2.) Rename the "Basic" Theme to "Dual-Theme", as its main technical
benefit is that it offers two themes, one mobile and one standard, for
those who would be interested in this type of setup. In the description
for the theme, I will mention that the mobile theme is "beta" quality
due to problems with it mentioned in my email yesterday: "Shelan,
another contributor around 2010 created a mobile weblog view for a blog,
as you can see in the upper-right corner here:
http://www.nailedtothex.org/roller/kyle/entry/nested-list-element-issue-of1
. The mobile theme doesn't seem to work right today (that blog entry at
that link shows the problems with it, the blogger had to make changes
basically making it a standard blog anyway, and even with those changes
I saw further errors with it.)"
By renaming this theme, we keep its main benefit while ensuring actual
bloggers realize there's problems with the present mobile theme and so
they may wish either fix it (and hopefully submit a patch), remove the
mobile theme capability (if they like the standard theme by itself) or
bring in another mobile theme. The current problem with 5.1 is that we
name the theme "Basic" which causes many to use it. However, those
accessing the blog using a smart phone or tablet end up getting an buggy
Mobile theme. Further, since most of the blood and effort today is in
creating responsive themes, fixing the problem with Basic's secondary
mobile theme isn't going to be a high priority for anyone.
3.) Bring in the Rolling theme
(https://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/roller-extras/wiki/Themes) from
Roller-Extras, I've been using a customized version of it since 2005
(http://web-gmazza.rhcloud.com/blog/) and superblogger Arun Gupta of
Sun/Oracle also used it for many years. It's an unapologetically
non-responsive theme with wide columns good for blogging code, it's easy
to modify and change the right side column heading topics (mine are
different from the basic theme), and doesn't use any advanced CSS/JS
libraries--it's easy to customize. It will also attract people who would
otherwise use Basic/Dual-Theme but don't wish to be saddled with an
unworking mobile theme, or (like me) don't even want to try to have
their blog entries rendered for smart phones.
(Note that Rolling may be LGPL licensed, as Roller-Extras as a whole is,
but it was apparently authored by Dave according to its theme.xml, so if
Dave could hereby declare it ASL we should be in good shape.)
As an alternative to #2 and #3, what we can do is remove the mobile
capability from the Basic theme so it works OOTB, and add to the user's
guide how to create a dual-theme Theme, bringing in Shelan's
beta-quality mobile theme viewer in that article (or just using the
gaurav theme as the mobile viewer).
WDYT?
Regards,
Glen
- More theme ideas for Roller 5.1... Glen Mazza
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