[Owncloud] Theming and Formfactors

[Martin Feuersänger]

Arthur Schiwon (Blizzz) wrote:
> On Wednesday 01 February 2012 16:05:50 Thomas Tanghus wrote:
>
>> On Wednesday 01 February 2012 15:18 Frank Karlitschek wrote:
>>
>>> Theming:
>>> I propose a similar system for the theming. We add a "theme" config
>>> option to the config.php so that the theme can be configured during
>>> deployment and controlled from the outside without the need to
>>> understand our database structure. We add "themes" directory into
>>> /core where every theme has a
>>> directory named after the theme name. The template and css loader
>>> looks into the selected theme directory first for templates and css
>>> files and loads them if a file is present. If not it just falls back
>>> to the default files in the individual app directories. This has the
>>> benefit that the person who creates the themes can override what ever
>>> has to be changed but don´t have to provide a complete new frontend.
>>> The directory structure
>>> inside the themes folder is the same as the rest of owncloud. This
>>> means that a theme developer can just put a different
>>> "apps/contacts/css/styles.css" in the theme directory to change the
>>> style of the contacts app.
>>
>> I haven't kept up-to-date on what is possible with CSS nowadays, but
>> couldn't we come a long way by using CSS variables [1]? Is it possible
>> to include a stylesheet defining the color scheme into another CSS file?
>>
>>
>> Now the colors in /core/css/styles.css are hardcoded and I've had to
>> copy some of them to the app stylesheet. It would be much easier just to
>> change one file with color/border/etc definitions and use e.g.
>> "var(mainbackgroundcolor)".
>>
>>
>> [1] http://disruptive-innovations.com/zoo/cssvariables/
>>
>
> Agree, it makes sense to define colors  in a basic theme file and use the
>  variable. Although not everyone seem to love varialbes in CSS, it would
> make things simpler. Not only theming itself, but also specific styles in
> apps may look good in different themes.
I recently deployed Owncloud on several machines. I usualy hava a browser
tab open for each machine. Now you can imagine that it get's very
confusing to tell which Owncloud login screen is which machine. They all
look exactly the same. So I changed the css on each machine to give it
it's individual header color.

Hence, before implementing full themability, just being able to change the
header color of the current design by introducing some settings for the
admin user would be a nice first step and large usability improvement.

Also inclusion of an individial text line at the login screen would help.

Cheers,
  Martin

PS: Argh, another mailing list where the reply goes to the author directly
instead back to the list. Sorry, Arthur.