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    • I lost all control when i changed the theme to andreas09 (solved)

    Posted by vukoxx on Mon 26 of Jan, 2009 03:05 GMT-0000 posts: 2

    i just gave tikiwiki one more try,
    i've downloaded 2.2svn (23.01.09), andreas09, eatlon and litejazz.
    Here are some issues i had to deal with:

    • andreas09
      when i changed the theme to andreas09 the wiki lost all style information and i even lost ability to login.
      i solved this problem by simply deleting:
      • tikiroot/style/andreas09
      • tikiroot/style/andreas09.css
      • tikiroot/templates/style/andreas09

      Neil_A just had to clean his caches to get andreas working with 2.2, somehow that didn't work for me, now i know:
      when your chosen theme is deleted, tikiwiki will fall back to tikineat, which is the basic theme.

    • eatlon
      seems to work quite fine, so far...
      (special acclamation, it's great, as all themes with tikiwiki are 😉 )

    • litejazz
      it had some minor problems:
      • The site forgets if you chose left/right menus to be hidden, on the next wikipage both menus will always become visible again.
      • The footer has no background image. Grey text on grey background is annoying.

      i compared some files in eatlon and andreas:
      the function for menu hiding is located in style/../tiki.tpl
      in andreas there is
      a class="flip" href="#" onclick="toggleCols
      while in eatlon it's done through
      a class="flip" href="javascript:flip
      and there are a whole lot more differences... 😢

    Now i would really like to help to clean things up. If i make things work for me i'd like nobody else to do the same work again.
    My first question is why are there still unnecessary(?) themes in svn while really good themes are left outside?
    And a 2nd question is, if i update i.e. litejazz to 2.2svn who could then tell what a user with tikiwiki 2.1.3 is supposed to do?
    As a newbie to everything i feel somehow unsure...

    Reads: 89222
    Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee on Mon 26 of Jan, 2009 09:20 GMT-0000 posts: 254 Japan

    Thanks for your feedback. The themes work as expected when released, based on our tests, but there's always the chance of something not right when they are installed, due to some oversight or due to site configuration differences, etc.

    About your points:

    > when i changed the theme to andreas09 the wiki lost all style information....

    This normally doesn't happen; many sites use this theme successfully. I don't know what would cause it at your site. This should be pursued if it's a problem, but I can't reproduce the problem at my sites.

    > tikiwiki will fall back to tikineat....

    That's right. Tikineat is the default theme in TikiWiki 2; it is more mature as it has been part of the core files for a long time, whereas some of the other 'nicer' themes are new and so are less tested. This will change in TikiWiki 3.

    > litejazz . . . forgets if you chose left/right menus to be hidden

    This is a javascript/cookie issue not related to themes; there are a couple of slight differences in the method here depending on whether the theme uses floating divs or a table to display the columns, but the method used by litejazz is also used by other table-using themes, and I'm not aware of a pattern in this area.

    > The footer has no background image. Grey text on grey background is annoying.

    Oops, the docs are missing. As you can see at http://zukakakina.com/LiteJazz, this theme has styling for custom footer code. But it seems the docs on this got lost at some point. I'll take care of that.

    > i compared some files in eatlon and andreas . . . there are a whole lot more differences...

    Well, yeah, they are intentionally different. Andreas09 uses floated divs for column layout (like a number of other Tiki themes that import /lite/lite.css), but this method doesn't work (esp. in IE7) for designs like LiteJazz where side margins are used (See Tiki_110_Theme_Ideas for more info.) For this kind of design, a table is used for layout that works in all browsers. (Kubrick, Dark Shine, Faulkner, etc., also use this layout.) So their menu-hiding javascript and a few other details are different to suit the context.

    > why are there still unnecessary(?) themes in svn while really good themes are left outside?

    To some extent old themes were carried along because nobody objected and because some established sites still use them and wanted the continuity. In the next TikiWiki release though, coming in March or so, the number of included themes will be reduced quite a bit. The second part of the answer is that many of the "really good" themes have a license, such as GPL or Creative Commons Attributive, that is not compatible with TikiWiki's (LGPL) and so the files cannot be distributed as part of the TikiWiki package.

    > And a 2nd question is, if i update i.e. litejazz to 2.2svn who could then tell what a user with tikiwiki 2.1.3 is supposed to do?

    As far as the Tiki releases are concerned, I don't think the differences in the incremental updates, which are limited to security fixes and major functional bug fixes, should affect themes. For themes that aren't in the Tiki package, I think basically having compatibility with the major Tiki release versions (updating for Tiki 2, for Tiki 3, etc.) is probably sufficient.

    -- Gary