Theme Design Forum

Page: 1

Topic: Some notes about creating themes (Read 1492 times)

« Previous | Next »

User Account

Some notes about creating themes

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

10:10 PM

The basics

You can edit themes in the same "Manage" area where you edit a website, by selecting the Theme Editor. The ability to quick link to it is coming in a future update.
Be sure to first use the "Save As..." button to get started and not accidentally overwrite your old theme.
Currently, to see how your theme changes affect a site, you can the Preview Window menu button on the bottom of the screen to bring up a window and see live updates. We are currently working on moving this live update functionality outside the manage area, so you can edit a theme on a forum page and see it right there. When available, we'll post here.
Save changes often! This is an alpha product and the site may time you out or similar. Well, it shouldn't, but it has to us...

The Sections

Layout: Header, Body, and Footer. These are the basic framing elements of all pages in a theme. The Body is pretty self explanatory. It has to do with the center part of the page -- where all the content is. A width here, sets it also for the header and footer. Sides are the parts to the left and right of center. Some designs like the one on this page have a different background (gray with a pattern in this case). You can also set transitions between the center and the sides.
Modules: These are settings specific to the kinds of modules in a website, like Forums, Blogs, Wikis, and Stores.
General: Things that are universal and don't fit elsewhere.

Theme Editor details

There are many types of settings that change the CSS (or sometimes the underlying HTML). Most should be pretty apparent -- combo boxes for premade selections (either forced choice, or just suggestion type). Colors have two different color selectors, a basic one and a more advanced one.
Sometimes you will have a choice between a different sets of settings for the same object. For example, the background color of the body. It can be a single Plain Color, or a Duotone Pattern (select a greyscale picture and choose two colors to provide as the white and black), Pattern (choose a colored pattern, and optionally colorize it with another color choosing how much to mix in), and Duotone Vertical (same as Duotone pattern, but it is not repeated vertically, so it can be used to just change the top of an area).

Page: 1

1 user online :: 0 Registered, 1 Guests

There are currently no registered users are online.