theme detail question (Visual appearance)

Regular Joined: Jan 27, 2008 Posts: 99

O.k. been playing with Nuke for about 5 years now and it never crossed my mind about theme detail till now.

Here is what I have noticed Nuke is usualy sharp looking but the colors are kind of basic. Have been playing with Platinum for the past few months and the theme colors seam to be sharper in a metalic sort of way. Have looked into Evo and the colors are very rich and the site realy jumps out at you with a metalic look (even dull colors)

Is this because of programming or just the effort of the people that design the themes?

I am currently working on a package project for race tracks to use to build their track site and was looking at using Platinum as the base. I am currently dscussing a new modual creation with evader and he mentoned that he works with and recoments Raven so I have been looking at Raven and love what I am seeing about security and ease of use.

The people that will be Admin for the track sites are usualy great racers but know little about web site opperation. they are looking for a high gloss look and idiot proof data entry.

So back to my earlier question sort of. Can you give Raven a crisp high gloss theme like is found on an Evo site or at least a good metalic like Platinum themes are sporting? Also what type of themes does raven use? regular PHP Nuke or do you have to modify them. If you have to modify them is there anyone out there that is specializing in raven themes right now?

Thanks

Eric

registered · Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 6:17 pm

Yes. There isn't anything unusual or different about the themes for the two (at least visually). One could take a theme from Evo and port it to Nuke. The problem is that most of those Evo themes seem to have forum mods and other things built into them that might take a bit of work to weed out.

Conversely you could start from scratch and design a theme that looks like what you want for RN. There isn't anything fundamental in RN that prevents that....I just think Plantinum and Evo have more gamers as a user base so more flashier themes were designed for them.

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 6:32 pm

cool thanks, I tried to do a theme a while ago and realized that I am barely an installer lol. Guess I will have to track down one of those "flashy" gammers to do the themes I need Wink

Posted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 7:52 pm

The underlying theme colors are usually specified in a very few lines of code in the theme.php for a given theme. They might look like this:

Code:

$bgcolor1 = '#F4F6FB';


$bgcolor2 = '#BBCCDC';


$bgcolor3 = '#F4F6FB';


$bgcolor4 = '#BBCCDC';


$textcolor1 = '#516A88';


$textcolor2 = '#516A88';

(from fisubice).

The Ravennuke themes have been heavily customized from the base Nuke themes to be html 4.01 valid. There were numerous basic coding errors in the Nuke themes such as tables, table rows and table cells that weren't properly opened and close that drive the programmers among us nuts. These are fixed for many of the RN themes.

As to colors, these could be changed by just changing the hex codes I posted above plus other color codes that appear throughout. You really need to be careful however about the interactions with some modules. During the updating process I described we found instances when the new foreground text color was not visible on the new background color in some obscure modules such as statistics. So you really need to test thoroughly. That said, someone with a good sense of color (I work on themes but am color blind and probably worse am only interested in text) could make valuable contributions.

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 7:12 am

wrecit wrote:

Here is what I have noticed Nuke is usualy sharp looking but the colors are kind of basic. Have been playing with Platinum for the past few months and the theme colors seam to be sharper in a metalic sort of way. Have looked into Evo and the colors are very rich and the site realy jumps out at you with a metalic look (even dull colors)

Themes for Evo and Platinum are usually heavy on graphics and therefore page load times tend to be longer. Also from my experience they are poorly coded, unlike fisubice. Wink

I agree that straight Nuke sites do seem to be lacking on decent themes, unlike other CMS's like Joomla, which is a shame.

This website recently popped onto the scene: http://www.ethaidesign.com/
The themes look good, but they are not HTML 4.01 Transitional compliant. Sad

With a bit of work, most themes can be made compliant, which in theory should give you a more consistent look in different browsers.

Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2008 8:13 am

That site is a good example of what can be achieved visually by using good images etc though the underlying code is the same a pretty much every other non-compliant nuke theme.