Theme selector in Iron Giant sites, good, bad, or horrid?
pieterh wrote on 27 Oct 2009 08:36
I've been trying to convince the cold-hearted dudes I work with that we should offer the default-template as default. They (I won't mention names because Michal and Piotr might be offended) feel the admin:themes page is unusable for ordinary users, and the built-in theme selector much nicer.
Comments?
Comments: 17
page revision: 1, last edited: 27 Oct 2009 08:37
Well, I'd never use the admin:themes selector myself… I'd just prefer to go to themes.wikidot.com and choose something from there. It looks alright to me.
I'm not exactly sure how the built-in theme selector works. Isn't that only temporary, and meant to be used for experimenting with different themes?
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Thanks for not mentioning names, Pieter.
I am talking about admin:themes, as seen e.g. on http://default-template.wikidot.com/admin:themes
The build in theme chooser is not necessarily nicer, but:
At least a few Wikidot users (not newbies) got really confused after seeing the proposed theme management stack. So I agree with Pieter, this should be discussed.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
I do my best to be diplomatic. :-)
The user-space stack works well: edit, save, reload. This has been discussed a lot and is now widely used. You get full history, revisions, diffs, etc. I've wanted to have CSS on a page (rather than in a text box in the manager) for ages, and this works.
There are real benefits and I don't see what complexity it adds, but I agree it is not fully functional.
What I need as designer and user:
All this now works, except the last part is missing. So how do we make that?
If you say people got confused, please explain what this means. I can't solve fuzzy problems like "confusing" and "complex".
Portfolio
Indeed Michal, you have a point… some guru's and I are working on CSS.wikidot.com and it is an Iron Giant theme… and we are explaining how a normal theme (the old way in the admin:manage) can be adjusted, using the old page structure. I wished to do some stuff with popups and I was realy confused… where should i put this?… So I looked further and saw the lets say "in-site-css-manager" and I tried it there… And boy !!!! huray huray!!! that's easy. That works cool… No hassle with the ctrl-s no 4-time click before you can see the results of your edit…
True maybe not everybody is keen on changing or customizing his/her theme… But there is the trend to personalize everything in your life… ringtones, skins, clothing… you name it… even coffeemachines come in many colors…so the easier it is made to change it the better I think… Even Squark wants to get a peace of the cake and he is selling themes @ http://marketplace.wikidot.com (your welcome for the free ad squark)
So I say YES to the new revolution and rewrite the history so it fits the future, meaning try to put the existing themes in the new interface and adjust existing documentation
A - S I M P L E - P L A N by ARTiZEN a startingpoint for simple wikidot solutions.
I hate …
No no, that doesn't quite emphasise the point… let me reword it:
I REALLY hate the CSS interface in the Site Manager. Why? Because:
Iron Giant's CSS structure is the way of the future — none of the above problems exist. PLUS, when you change the CSS, the results are instantaneous.
Ah, James, this made me laugh! Thanks for keeping me company here. I'll add a couple more points:
But complaining is easy (and fun!), more pragmatic is (a) what problems did your test subjects have, Michal, and (b) how do we solve those?
For me the major one is that when I click on a different image, it does not actually install the new CSS.
Additionally:
I reckon a simple fix is to improve the page so that it explains very clearly how to copy/paste the theme URI, period. We can assume that anyone building a wiki can at least edit a page…
Portfolio
The only problem I am attacking here is: make it dead-simple for users to change the default theme. Without learning CSS, just following the on-screen instructions where necessary and choosing one of pre-defined themes.
For this, I think it would be much simpler to improve the built-in theme picker, or make "install theme" button from themes.wikidot.com for custom themes.
So far the process of reading explanations on admin:theme, confronting this with instructions on themes.wikidot.com simply does not provide a clear way to do this. And we should make this experience as dead-simple as possible, because customization is a key feature.
Do not get me wrong — most of Wikidot users will figure out what is going on, but is imho still far from straightforward for someone just starting. But changing theme is such a simple operation that it should not have any learning curve. Which we should aim for.
I am glad we eventually made it possible (thanks to external themes and codeblock extraction) not to use the default CSS custom editor, and building user-space CSS theme stacks. This is good. And we can start thinking how to dump this editor.
BTW: admin:theme says We use a single custom theme called "My theme" which is defined by the following code block — which is defined, but not actually used. One more puzzle for new users.
Michał Frąckowiak @ Wikidot Inc.
Visit my blog at michalf.me
Why don't you use the popups like in the theme.wikidot.com but then more elegant.
A - S I M P L E - P L A N by ARTiZEN a startingpoint for simple wikidot solutions.
Perhaps we can use CSIs to manage the Theme Selector in Iron Giant projects…
This way, whatever the future may be with the Theme Selector, we can instantly update the Theme Selector page on all wikis.
Because each Iron Giant project has a different theme, the CSS code block can't be part of the CSI… the information around the CSS code block can be CSIed.
I have created a working example of this in the sandbox:
Look at the source code of both pages so you can see what I mean.
IMO you can replace below with above and merge the two CSIs into a single one that follows the code block.
This is nice and I'd like to swap that in for all Iron Giant sites. Note that we have some sites (techblog-template.wikidot.com at least) that use a different theme set.
Portfolio
Perhaps there's been a misunderstanding? I think I've misunderstood you…
There's only one CSI, the second page is an example of the CSI in action…
I misread it… ok, a single CSI with two halves, nothing to change then.
Portfolio
Shall I create a single example on one iron giant template?
So next steps:
Portfolio
Done. I've done this to the Calendar Template.
I was actually going to do this to the default template, but (ROFL) I don't have privileges to edit the admin:manage page.
BTW, it's Module 10
OK, most templates done. The chatroom template needs your touch and the techblog template needs a minimalist theme selector. There are a few templates that use different custom themes, these I've not updated.
Portfolio
OK, seen the minimalist theme selector and am using now. Nice stuff!
Portfolio