What

The main idea is to add a Tiki Theme Generator. While doing this, many things make sense to improve at the same time.

Specific goals

Palette editor

One target is a way to set background and text colors. This is what http://themes.tiki.org/Tiki theme generator talks about mostly, so far. The palette editor in trunk has shown that there are a lot of very similar colors. Reducing the number of colors is an important next step. This needs to be done by examining the stylesheets and finding the reason for the similar colors. If there is apparently no particular reason for color variations, they can be merged. But some near-matches can be intentional, such as backgrounds in subtly alternating odd-even rows in a data table or other cases when a subtle background contrast is used. These shouldn't be changed, so the context of these color uses needs to be checked.

http://colllor.com/

Method for setting other layout details

In addition to colors, a way to set such things as borders (on/off, size, color) perhaps specifically for items or generally for the overall appearance; whitespace ("tight", "open") again probably globally so a number of CSS rules would be set as a group).
Two approaches seem to emerge here: one is to have an editor that can be used to specify individual CSS rules in detail; another way would be to select options that would cause a set of rules to be chosen. In other words, the interface could have gadgets to input specific colors and sizes, etc., or could have dialogs so the user could choose design or palette themes like "light", "dark", "summer", "condensed", "open", etc., or choose options for specific design details.

Examples of similar ideas, etc.

Drupal color module (palette editor)
Montage (layout configurator)

This has a different purpose, as it's a personal aggregation of items from around the web, but the method for laying out the page is interesting.

Drupal Skinr

Maybe relevant. "Skinr's main purpose is to allow the theme to define a set of reusable and modular CSS styles, and to make those styles available in Drupal's UI."

90 Minute Intro to the Fusion Theming Framework

"Fusion is a powerful base theme, with layout and style configuration options built in that you can control through Drupal's UI. It's based on a simplified 960px or fluid 12/16-column grid. It's designed to be used with the Skinr module, with numerous useful block styles included."

Note that Skinr and Fusion are third-party software for Drupal there may not be up to date with the current Drupal release. ("The Drupal 7 version [of Fusion] is now quite usable, but waiting on Skinr support.")

Who

Jonny Bradley
Marc Laporte
Gary Cunningham-Lee
You

When

For Tiki 7.0

Scenarios

Theme Roller

Steps

Consultation

~~Get the community involved~~ done

Cleanup up phase

~~rip phplayersmenu (see cleanup page)~~ done
~~rip XAJAX (add essential via jQuery)~~ done
~~Fix regression: theme .tpl files aren't used when assigning theme on object or category level~~ done
Consider reorganizing rules in current CSS files
- Reduce "vertical" redundancy (reduce repetition in lite.css -> layout.css/design.css -> theme stylesheet)
- Reduce "horizontal" complexity by changing feature-specific classes to global ones so they don't need to be styled separately (ex: .calHeading -> .heading) and downsize or eliminate feature-specific CSS files.
- Move font definitions from design.css to new type.css?

Revamp

Evaluate if we should pick a CSS framework
Revamp Print.css and FullScreen
Consolidate tiki_index_raw, tiki_p_index,
With Robert and S5, consolidate tiki-slideshow, tiki-slideshow2, etc.
Review Print Indexed to make nicer
Tiki Theme Generator
Canonical URL Tag
Use any font in Tiki (not just web fonts) HTML5
Be in a position to do Offline and site-to-site PluginInclude later
Would like possibility of theme options having their own .tpl files (Gary).
Enable multiple theme options per theme (to get a lot of permutations easily)
Theme options: make it possible to combine them
Is it possible and would it make sense to use CSS sprites for icons, etc. (or would this be incompatible with user-specified icons)?
New post-it, top-of-site style section (for temp warnings)

Copy to clipboard

<div id="postit" style="background: #ffc; margin: 2px 0 0 2px; min-height: 1px; width: 100%; padding:5px;">
<img src="http://tiki.org/img/icons/close.png" alt="Close" width="16" height="16" class="rbox-close" onclick="confirm('Are you sure you want to close this note and keep it hidden permanently on next page load? (If you ever want it back, you would need to delete the cookie named flip_class_postit in your browser settings.)') ? flip_class('postit','hidden','hidden') : false;" style="border: none" title="Close" />
<img src="img/icons/exclamation.png" alt="Warning" style="vertical-align:middle" /> <strong>Please Note:<br />This site is currently running <a href="http://doc.tiki.org/Tiki6">Tiki6 Beta</a>. Please be patient while we <a href="http://tiki.org/Dogfood">Dogfood</a> Tiki and resolve issues. </strong></div>

Communications

Theme upgrades from 6 to 7 will require work.
- From 2 to 3, there was a big revamp
- From 4 to 6, it was incremental adjustments, and upgrading Tiki had little impact on custom themes.
  - Now, we need to make a substantial reorganization.

Misc. references, resources, etc.