A while back, we segmented themes in the backend in recommended and available themes. The recommended themes were modern at the time, the others collected since the birth of serendipity, so often quite old. A while later we moved away from the theme named default towards 2k11 as new default theme, from which the other themes take smarty templates and other files if they are missing the requested file. This move broke old themes, since they expected the old html structure provided by the theme called default - and I guess we were missing the energy back then to address that problem, as must have been the initial plan, or didn't realize the problem immediately.
A common breakage I've seen in the wild is the comment form. That used a table for its layout before. In the classic themes the comment form is now often distorted, they lack the CSS to format the form properly.
At the same time, I think the classic themes are valuable. They provide choice, and a today uncommon choice fitting to a blog engine as old as serendipity. Sure, it's good that we have new themes, but the old ones make at the very least for interesting foundations for blogs with unique designs. But currently, many of the old themes will give a bad first impression and sometimes are not even able to show their design anymore (some used graphic files that now are not applied anymore etc). Although a while back I went through all of them and fixed hard errors that broke the program execution, that's not enough. It's a bad user experience.
I suggest we fix that:
- Port themes over so that their design works completely with the markup provided by 2k11
- Set
default as the theme engine for those themes that rely too much on the old layout to make step 1 possible
- Look whether default can be improved without breaking the old themes, so that it is a better foundation. So that it looks okay on small screens, especially (iirc responsive design came with 2k11).
- Remove themes that are completely unsalvageable.
Goal is to make every theme listed in the backend a worthwhile choice that properly renders a Serendipity blog - just in a classic look if a classic theme is picked over a modern one (keeping in mind that the recommended themes are also not exactly new by now).
A while back, we segmented themes in the backend in recommended and available themes. The recommended themes were modern at the time, the others collected since the birth of serendipity, so often quite old. A while later we moved away from the theme named default towards 2k11 as new default theme, from which the other themes take smarty templates and other files if they are missing the requested file. This move broke old themes, since they expected the old html structure provided by the theme called default - and I guess we were missing the energy back then to address that problem, as must have been the initial plan, or didn't realize the problem immediately.
A common breakage I've seen in the wild is the comment form. That used a table for its layout before. In the classic themes the comment form is now often distorted, they lack the CSS to format the form properly.
At the same time, I think the classic themes are valuable. They provide choice, and a today uncommon choice fitting to a blog engine as old as serendipity. Sure, it's good that we have new themes, but the old ones make at the very least for interesting foundations for blogs with unique designs. But currently, many of the old themes will give a bad first impression and sometimes are not even able to show their design anymore (some used graphic files that now are not applied anymore etc). Although a while back I went through all of them and fixed hard errors that broke the program execution, that's not enough. It's a bad user experience.
I suggest we fix that:
defaultas the theme engine for those themes that rely too much on the old layout to make step 1 possibleGoal is to make every theme listed in the backend a worthwhile choice that properly renders a Serendipity blog - just in a classic look if a classic theme is picked over a modern one (keeping in mind that the recommended themes are also not exactly new by now).