Customizing Compliant Themes

Worker Joined: Oct 18, 2005 Posts: 127 Location: NYC

I like to customize themes: new graphics, colors, spacing, etc, can I safely do this with keeping the themes compliant?

What would it take to make iCGstation compliant, as I like that theme as a base to create other themes?

Thank You

JoAnne ~

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

Wow. I am not familiar with iCGstation so I can't speak specifically to that. The problem with theme compliancy does not lie just with the theme, unfortunately. It actually goes way back to the very beginning of nuke when it was called ThatWare. There were no standards that were followed in the incarnation and as FB released subsequent code changes he had/has even less appreciation for anything along the lines of good coding standards. All that to say what you probably already know: theme code and presentation is intertwined in core nuke modules. So, when attempting to standardize and/or make the code base compliant it usually involves changing some core nuke code somewhere along the line. Bottom line is that we can't give you a list of things that you need to do. Each theme is pretty much autonomous.

Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 1:10 pm

While Raven is (of course) correct, and we have no idea what icgstation is like, I have looked at some other third party themes (those not included in the distribution of RN2.10). They made pretty much the same mistakes and had the same non-compliance issues we found in the base set of themes in RN.

Unquoted attributes ... e.g. bgcolor=#ffffff instead of '#ffffff' this is hit and miss in most themes I saw.

not using htmlentities such as & amp consistently or at all in some cases

incorrect nesting of tables, trs and tds ... this one will drive you buggy to find and like Raven says sometimes the core code adds in part of a table and somehow the theme is expected to know to close it

-- we also made some other changes that you might want to consider

such as, using single quotes instead of double ones for string concatenation. This can be tricky but it improves efficiency especially since Themes get pounded on all the time and

using language constants consistently instead of hard-coding say "or" or "more" or a dozen others.

Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 5:24 pm

Thank you so much Raven and fkelly

Yes, I have seen many times the incorrect nesting of tables in PHPNuke themes. I struggled with nesting tables before I used PHPNuke themes when I worked with html web sites and themes. I also noticed the single quotes. I can see that alot of work was put into making the themes compliant.

This information is very helpful and most appreciated!

Thank you again!

All the Best,

JoAnne ~

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Client Joined: Dec 24, 2004 Posts: 194 Location: Michigan

i also use ICGStation and like it alot as well.. i do have it as default theme on one of my sites and have wondered about this very question tho i have no clue where to start to even think about making it compliant.....i especially like it for the forums more than any of it i think....and i have never had a theme related issue that i can think of either...i would be willing to upload it or send by email if we can get someone to look into it ????

Posted: Wed May 09, 2007 10:12 pm

Please send it along to me at raven__AT__ravenphpscripts__DOT__com. No promises but we will try to look into it Smile

Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 6:54 am

Greetings folks,

I have several modded themes from the core group of themes in RN 1.0 up and running. I am curious if there are going to be changes in RN 2.0 to the themes and if my changes will still work when I upgrade my sites? I dicovered after posting here that in RN 1.0 Deep Blue was changed in its base code and that was why my changes were not working. I had copied and modded the theme to work in the phpnuke 7.7 distro which is what I was using until I dicovered you good folks. Thanks again guys for making my life easier.

Posted: Thu Jul 05, 2007 7:12 am

First let's get the version nomenclature straight. RN had 2.02, then 2.10, then 2.10.01. We are working on 2.20 now. [edited}

The themes changes (which are discussed earlier in this thread, and there's a sticky post I did elsewhere that details the status of all themes in 2.10) were pretty extensive. And yes even to the base code because that was needed to make them compliant and fix bad nesting of tables trs and tds etc. There was one theme change that I can think of in 2.10.01 and that was to take a font size out the font class in fisubice/style.css. It is under discussion whether we will make similar changes to the other style.css's in 2.20.

So, long and short of it, you should have no worries in 2.20 if that's the release you are talking about. If it's not then you need to clarify your post.