Serendipity Forums

Hi all,

On another thread I was asked to start the ball rolling on producing a definitive guide to theming. Its a massive project but someone has to do it.

Anyway, I've made a start, and my first contribution is ready to download. Quite simply this is just the default theme stylesheet re-organised and commented. The reason for this is just that I had to start somewhere, and the default theme is one of the starting places new theme designers go to.

Anyone familiar with theming already probably won't get much value from this download, but I would still welcome your comments. The stylesheet works, and can be placed into your default theme if you wish (just rename the file). For beginners to theming this download will probably be invaluable in helping them to learn the fundamentals of the s9y stylesheet.

One downside to only commenting the default stylesheet is that many of the undocumented styles aren't included, but this is the next step. I have already made significant progress toward identifying every single style used within s9y, and hope to produce a follow-up guide to styles. A new theme is being created to showcase the options available through css alone, ie without altering any of the smarty files.

A further step would be identifying every style used within the major plugins. The mind boggles doesn't it?

Ok, enough rambling from me, the download is available here

My final request, if you have any comments, please make them here, the project is too important to be scattered all around the web.

Hi Carl!

Would you like to share that documented Stylesheet in the WIKI area of www.s9y.org? I could create you a page, or you could insert it yourself in our "Technical Documentation" section? This should be world-writable for exactly those cases...

Best regards,
Garvin

Hi Garvin,

No problem, the wiki needs something like this, and the way the project is going (documenting styles) its going to be 'Bigger than Ben Hur'. I've never put posts into a wiki before, and don't know if there are anyconventions that need to be followed, do I need anything?

Also, would other users be able to make comments etc?

Cheers
Carl

The s9y wiki is publicly editable (heck, I've done it myself, and I don't even HAVE a login on the wiki).

There are some formatting rules (it's not HTML), but they're listed on the entry page, as I recall. At least, they can be found.

Since it's publicly editable, other users can make comments. I will. I'm even considering that doing the same thing for the default Smarty templates would be a big boost to templateers.

There's not much of "wiki style" applicable.

You can insert your code quite easily.Go to http://www.s9y.org/40.html and click on "New document" (http://www.s9y.org/40.html?cmd=newdoc). Enter the title (like "Understanding CSS: Documented Stylesheet").

Then you can useWIKI syntax to structurize your document. For an example how you can do that look at the WIKI code of http://www.s9y.org/44.html?cmd=editdoc

You can embed your CSS code within <code>...</code> tags, then all HTML within that is escaped and should render fine in the wiki.

Just have a look at it and try it out, that would be much appreciated!

Best regards,
Garvin

I've added the commented default theme stylesheet to the wiki, it can be found here

Hope this helps,
Carl