Themes/Skins

[DrazharLn]

Done. SMAC theme now in smac directory, SMAX theme in smax directory. Sorry for the brief downtime, had a weird bug when I tried to symlink to make it a seamless transition.

[Buster's Uncle]

Nice work.

The following folders in /Themes, BTW, are only still there because there was at least one thing I couldn't change the permissions to delete:

bitti
Cadence_MultiColor1-1
Catalysm_2
fire_09
gul
LCARS-1
mevlana
spectacular
sus
TeonunLaneti_v1
Themes/XD-Zeda

[Buster's Uncle]

I assume it's good for the server to cut down on useless junk taking up storage space, and it would make ongoing periodic tasks like uploading a new Shop image a little easier to not have to scroll past those useless folders looking for the working themes I'll have to keep updated...

[DrazharLn]

I'll move them all to a junk folder in my user directory. Won't really have any effect on server performance, but they do get in the way a bit for us humans.

I changed the background image for the buttons in the edit panel to be a bit more transparent, but it's still not great. If you could edit smac/images/bbc/bbc_bg.gif and bbc_hoverbg.gif to have partially transparent borders they would look a lot better. divider.gif could probably do with a change, too.

[Buster's Uncle]

Will do.  Gimme a few minutes...

[DrazharLn]

Also, the top menu is fixed at the top of the viewport with a transparent background. Seems to me like one of those things needs to go: it should either not be fixed (appears at top of real page but doesn't follow your scrolling) or it should have a opaque or translucent background.

To modify the css for this section, look for the rules for div#top_menu at line 54 in index.css.

Edit: just deleted those folders. And I set the top menu to be positioned normally for now (doesn't follow you around the page).

I'm off for tonight. Have fun

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay, if you want transparent edges on those buttons, I'll have to save them as .pngs -.gifs don't do transparencies- and you can track down all the instances and change .gif to .png.

First, I'll trim the light pixels off the corners and darken the borders and overwrite the .gifs in place.

[DrazharLn]

Didn't realise gif only supported binary transparency and not partials.

Changed default/GenericControls.template.php to look for pngs instead (it's using one I made at the moment for bbc_bg.png and nothing for bbc_hoverbg.png).

I'm really off for the night now.

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay; I darkened divider.gif 20% and blued it.  See if that suits you better.

Looking at SMAC now, and it looks good.  Feel free to fiddle and tweak to your heart's content while you're waiting for me to wake up in the morning.  SMAX needs all the same changes done -I just overwrote all the Minecraft files with the Black Ops SMACX mods to make it, and changed the colors and some details on the background- and it wouldn't hurt if they were a little more different from each other...

[Buster's Uncle]

Ooh; those buttons look pretty nice, now.

The vertical spacing in the root forum could still use some tightening - I'm all for getting as much on the top of the page as possible while still functional and attractive, AND the spaces between subforums look pretty crappy where a 3 pixel high slice of the Unity is showing though.  I probably won't get to those colors tonight, so feel free.  I mostly just paste the color code into the GIMP color menu, hue-shift to blueish and past back the new value, depending on the background contrast and what I think is and isn't ugly.

-Coding I got no great expertise at --- layout and design is another matter; some actual formal training, even.

[DrazharLn]

The buttons do look good The corners are still a bit too light on bbc_bg.png, but they're much better. bbc_hoverbg.png is fine.

I introduced a bug with that last change by requiring the png icons for all themes, rather than just SMAC. I've now gone back and fixed that (I realised I made the mistake just after I got into bed, but couldn't be bothered to come back out and fix .

I've removed some vertical whitespace on the root forum by removing the large top-padding on the subforum icons, hiding the dividers and removing 4px of top and bottom padding on every table cell.

I can make the transparent border disappear by adding "table.table_list{border-collapse:collapse}" to the css, but I don't think it looks as good. Try it out in chrome's developer mode and see what you think.

I still think that the thread view itself has too much vertical white space. Do you agree or do you like it how it is?

[Buster's Uncle]

I think the tab over each post should almost touch the post above it.

[Buster's Uncle]

In fact, ideally we get rid of the tabs, move the text into the line with the quote button, and make the posts just touch above and below.

There's something to be said for actually using a new theme seriously -you notice stuff you wouldn't just casually looking around.  I see that I need to darken the 'no new posts' icon for easy of distinguishing, for instance.

[Buster's Uncle]

The pages are just the teeniest bit wide in IE.  It's maybe just 10 empty pixels and it's not the width of the background, but it makes a scrollbar show at the bottom of the page, taking up space...

Also, the users online in the last 24 hours list isn't showing with the Who's online stuff at the bottom of the root.  I think only admins could see that, but I do track that info...

[Dio]

A few issues that I noticed.
1. The heading that basically welcomes guests and says to login or register is garbled.
2. The directory for the forums lists "community" twice.