Border Change Request [CLOSED]

Worker Joined: Jan 22, 2007 Posts: 104

One of the changes I had made to my site was adding a border to the individual entries for Downloads and WebLinks. In addition, I set the background for the table each individual entry was in to a slightly lighter color than the normal background. Coupled with the border, this helped to separate each individual entry. Without the border, the entries tend to bleed together and are difficult to read.

It looks like you guys have done this very thing on this website (minus the background change); however, 2.02.02 does not seem to contain this feature. Any chance you can add it to the 2.10 version so we don't have to modify core files which have a tendancy to get overwritten with upgrades?

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:01 am

My initial take on this is that it is theme dependent and that I doubt that we will go in changing a bunch of themes at this time. We had fits with the individual entries in Downloads and Weblinks because of the theme dependency issues: you had to have a certain combination of background colors and textcolors for the text to stand out and those modules tended to vary the colors from line to line and some of the combinations didn't work in some of the themes. I believe we have them all fixed now and I think that in future versions we'll be looking at making the presentation, somehow, independent of what the modules (weblinks, downloads, but others also) do. I put the word "somehow" in there because I don't think our approach is fully baked yet but it is something we will look into and welcome suggestions. As always, Raven has the last word but I thought I'd throw this in until he has a chance to look at it.

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:34 pm

So your saying that I could have made that change in the theme? I made the changes in the module itself. Any pointer on how to do it in the theme?

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 1:12 pm

You can look at what colors are being used in the module and then make sure that the corresponding colors in the theme are readable for the font. For instance if the module presents $textcolor2 over $bgcolor1 and that's not readable then you might have to change the colors in the theme ... looking for negative effects elsewhere of course. Or if the module "hard-codes" the color of the font and that color is not readable against the bgcolor for the theme you might need to change the color in the theme.

We tried to stay away from changing the coding in the modules wherever possible because they need to work with a dozen different themes and there is no telling what would happen if we did; we might make it work with one theme and wreck the way it works with 6 others. That's why this is a longer term issue ... we need to find a way to eliminate these kinds of interactions and probably the modules should just present pure text without any presentation elements and the themes should take care of the presentation. But getting from where Nuke is at now to that point isn't easy.

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 3:54 pm

That makes sense, and it's easy to modify the color. However, how did you add the 'line border' to your individual entries on the downloads (see here --> http://www.ravenphpscripts.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=14#cat). By default there is no border.

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 4:10 pm

This is probably because Raven isn't using the standard Nuke download module.

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 6:39 pm

It's a good question valdarez. I did a little looking around the view source thinking I'd find a table with a border of 1 and I didn't. There is an outerclass defined that does have such a border but I don't see it being used. However, there could be classes in other style files that you don't see in the page source. There is some Javascript being called that may also affect this situation.

As Jakec correctly points out Raven's download appears to be different from the "standard". I know it's different than the one on my Ravennuke 2.10 test site. Looking in the code just a bit for 2.10, it appears that in the viewdownload function of /downloads/index.php the author uses the standard OpenTable() call. That will execute the function from whatever the chosen theme is at that moment so your mileage may vary. However, there are a lot of presentation elements (tables, trs tds) in the index.php also, so that confounds matters.

It's Open Source of course and you are free to experiment. However, realize that modifying OpenTable would affect everything that calls that in the theme. You could try it just to see if it puts a border around the individual download. You could also modify the index.php of downloads to not use the standard theme and create a style for the table that would put or border around it or just put one there directly "border="1"" . None of these are really "good" solutions in my view. Downloads index.php is hopelessly complex already ... it's thousands of lines long with all sorts of functions that someone must have dreamed up under some kind of hallucinatory drug spell. But as I say, it is open source so have at it if you want. Just back up your stuff first and make the changes one at a time and see what happens.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

I use the last release of NukeStyles Advanced Downloads or whatever it was called.

Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 3:15 pm

Is that module still being actively supported? I found a URL to them at http://www.nukestyles.com/, but it is not responding.

Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2007 3:25 pm

No it's not being actively supported anymore by the author, but there have been some posts on NukeCops saying it's been taken over by someone else.