Garthilk:This is oh so important. Please allow for per-forum based skins.
You could get this to work in CS2.0 albeit a bit of a *bodge* by parsing the url of the forum eg /forums/127/ShowForum.aspx and loading a CSS file based on the ID of the forum, eg create a CSS file called 127.css.
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I was going to ramble in a new post about User-customized Profiles.. but, since talk is of skinning in 2.2, this seems a good place to interject-
In 2.2, please consider building-in the ability for users to completely customize (or wreck ;-) thier own profiles. I've ranted elsewhere of how important User Profiles are in social-networking apps... they don't just show tid-bits of data but reflect the user's personality, tastes, style.. etc. Profiles should be a User's space to decorate and act as thier "home/homepage".
What if User's Profile, Gallery, Blog.. could share themes/styles? How about Profile themes? Why not? What if profile layouts were determined by skins/themes.. and then additional, or advanced, customization could be by user's css overrides, stylesheet uploads, or even style selectors/browser, like the themes selector. I could imagine users sharing styles/sheets,... helping each another "decorate" their home(page).
I don't know how, say.. MySpace, does it, but browsing a few profiles shows the extent of customization possible.... i'm guessing that's prob one of the greatest appeals to many there.
Nick - nb development
rhoward:Can you please share more details on what "per-forum" skins means exactly? Is this simple color/CSS changes or are these heavier design changes at a forum-by-forum level?
Either way I'm really excited to hear about this. I think it's going to hopefully remove a large barrior to making CS more popular with a less technical audience.
Scott Watermasysk:Just to clarify a little of what Rob mentioned...1. We are working on a new skinning engine. The first goal of this engine is to make it *very* easy to create new themes. The target market for this is anyone with a little bit of CSS/markup skills (bonus points if you are comfortable with runat="Server". Besides bugs, this is the only shipping criteria we have for CS 2.2. The dev cycle should be fairly quick.2. Once the engine in #1 is written, we are going to develop a Theme which is can be managed 100% via the control panel (colors, font's, logo, layout, and hopefully much more). This will be a big part of CS 3.0 and it should be usable by anyone with a decent browser. It's target date is in the "winter".I have been working on a post or two about how and what we plan on building, but as Rob mentioned, we want to make sure we are happy with the results before we have people planning around them. We are very serious about improving the theming experience in CS. Our goal it to introduce this once, so if what we work on during the summer isn't cutting it, we may punt it until we get it right. Thanks,Scott
Just to clarify a little of what Rob mentioned...
1. We are working on a new skinning engine. The first goal of this engine is to make it *very* easy to create new themes. The target market for this is anyone with a little bit of CSS/markup skills (bonus points if you are comfortable with runat="Server". Besides bugs, this is the only shipping criteria we have for CS 2.2. The dev cycle should be fairly quick.
2. Once the engine in #1 is written, we are going to develop a Theme which is can be managed 100% via the control panel (colors, font's, logo, layout, and hopefully much more). This will be a big part of CS 3.0 and it should be usable by anyone with a decent browser. It's target date is in the "winter".
I have been working on a post or two about how and what we plan on building, but as Rob mentioned, we want to make sure we are happy with the results before we have people planning around them. We are very serious about improving the theming experience in CS. Our goal it to introduce this once, so if what we work on during the summer isn't cutting it, we may punt it until we get it right.
Thanks,Scott
This is great news Scott. I can make a few changes to the current skins through long periods of trial and error but would much prefer a system such as the one you describe in your post.
I'm trying to push CS for both internal projects and for projects from our clients. The current "skinning" implementation is very .NET-ish (I'm a .NET guy), so I like it, but our templating team (HTML and CSS) hates it.
However, I don't quite understand if the problem is truly technical. From what I gather, creating a "CSS-friendly" skinning solution could simply be a theme, coded towards an idea that the .NET doesn't change from skin to skin, and the CSS almost always does.
For example, one architectural problem we find in the current set of themes is that layout is determined somewhat by tables... this makes CSS engineers' lives unhappy, because they like to use styles to dictate layout. To this point, however, I don't understand why the theme .NET code could simply be engineered to use DIVs instead of TABLEs, as that would solve our problems. Heck any of the visual components fall under this rule, encapsulate them with DIVs.
And I would love to take the time to write this theme up, but we simply don't have the time. And being somewhat opensource, I'm baffled that someone else hasn't come up with a solution like this. I mean, I see Blog "themes" (sub-themes?) that are attempting this route, but I plan on using more than the Blog.
So, does this sound right? What would it take from someone (either at Telligent or not) to get this new theme created?
What "CraigBrunetti" is saying makes sense to me and I wonder if the CS team is thinking this route. I'm more familiar with Mambo/Joomla and learning CS right now. A theme based on tables is not friendly to most every CSS design I've read about with the div being the route most favored.
Does this make sense to the CS design team? Am I missing something here? I try to read all posts by main players on this forum and a few outside here, but I haven't found anything except that 2.2 will be better and 3.0 will be better yet for skinning.
Thanks to all the work everyone is doing to make CS a great product.
Lee
My issue is the "whole site" skin. I run CS for a single blog site/photo gallery.
First, I copied a blog theme and modified the CSS and Skin Files. Next, I had to modify the themes/default/common.css and several Themes/default/Skin files to match my newely created Blog Theme because there is no way to modify the Whole site like the header bar shown on the login screen.
So there i was happy as a camper. Then i noticed 2.1 was out today. I ran the db scripts for 2.1, copied the web folder on top of existing web folder. and *poof*, all my changes beyond "Themes/Blogs/MyTheme" were gone.
Luckily I backed everything up first to a separate folder for 2.1. I suppose now that i have 2.1 running, i could recopy 2.0 on top of 2.1 which in theory would replace files common to 2.0/2.1 but leave all new files for 2.1 that aren't in 2.0. But, what if a file that existed in 2.0 was changed for 2.1?
Confused? Me too!
trottintrails: So there i was happy as a camper. Then i noticed 2.1 was out today. I ran the db scripts for 2.1, copied the web folder on top of existing web folder. and *poof*, all my changes beyond "Themes/Blogs/MyTheme" were gone.
For now, the work-around to this issue is to perform a diff of the files so that you can replace your custom changes before updating. Yeah, it's not as seamless as it could be.
I'm very happy to hear that a new skinning engine should be available to the CS community within, say, 4-6 months. Hopefully.
In addition to the great suggestions that have been presented already, I'd like to offer the following as features that I would be very interested for the CS 2.2 release.
The ability to easily...
Overall, I am extremely excited about the CS product, and I would like to thank the CS development team and the Telligent organization for the power and flexibility of the product to date. Unfortunately, I'm not really a CSS/HTML type of guy (not that I couldn't learn, but time is a major factor for me these days), and this is an important aspect of the application/platform, as you have already acknowledged.
Can't wait to see how things turn out.
Thanks again
Following the principle of 'make it work, first, then make it pretty' is sound developer logic -- and I applaud Telligent's community-aided development approach. Community Server is model .Net application. Developers, as we know, struggle to get it just right. Given choices between making it better, adding new features and making it easier or prettier for non-developers, most developers pay attention to the former.
The community around CS is really the 'design department'. Within these forums and on sites mentioned are countless tidbits of documentation, customization, and explanation. Locating them, is always an eye-opener, but time consuming and not always effective.
As others noted, cleaning up the CSS is a priority. Adding some commentary to the distribution files would also help. My dream is for wiki integration so that forum posters can easily reference wiki subject content, much like inserting links to files and photos now. Ideally, for the more knowledgeable, updating organized wiki content should be as easy as replying to a post.
.Net is designed to make it possible for developers, designers and content contributors to work in parallel. From my limited experience, CS definitely on the way to making that possible. We just need a bit more organized info.
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