PatternSkin is currently too un-palettable

This has been implemented in PatternSkinColorSettingsDoc -- ArthurClemens - 02 Oct 2006

http://koala.ilog.fr/twikiirc/bin/irclogger_log/twiki?date=2006-07-11,Tue&sel=1029#l1025

MartinCleaver

ArthurClemens: in the templates you have comments such as:
#patternLeftBarContents .patternChangeLanguage { color:#8E9195; /*T8*/ }
what's with the T8?

ArthurClemens

its a documented constant
by lack of css constants

MartinCleaver

so can't we just generate the css? before you compress it?

ArthurClemens

if you want other colors, look for all occurrences of T8

MartinCleaver

I should be able to write %TMPL{"T8"}%
or

ArthurClemens

yes, with merediths plugin

MartinCleaver

which one?

ArthurClemens

it changed name
cacheattachment
so is T8 documented somewhere?

MartinCleaver

it'll take an age to recolor the site at this rate

ArthurClemens

Martin: at the top of colors.css

-

MartinCleaver looks

MartinCleaver

oh, y, I remember.
so do you manually edit all those colours, to make them consistent?
i.e. if you change them search & replace every place they are used?

ArthurClemens

manually, yes

MartinCleaver

cacheattachment won't intrinsically help here, unless it is doing substitutions as well as translating between topic & attachment
and anyway, we need edit attachment more than cache attachment

-

MartinCleaver winces at the idea
anyway, all those comments in the CSS must make the page take longer to load

ArthurClemens

cacheattachment creates an attachment from topic content
so any variables in the topic are converted to values I believe
well, that's why they are compressed
in develop branch

-- Contributors: MartinCleaver

Discussion

-- MartinCleaver - 12 Jul 2006

In short, the patternskin needs to have a defined palette so that a colour scheme can be rolled out throughout a site. Making the same changes by hand is completely unmaintainable.

-- MartinCleaver - 12 Jul 2006

The mentioned plugin is CacheContentPlugin. If pattern skin will rely on this plugin it should be included and switched on by default in the distribution. Seems useful to me.

-- ArthurClemens - 12 Jul 2006

I need to upload AttachContentPlugin if I haven't already. I renamed it to have a more sensible name.

-- MeredithLesly - 13 Jul 2006

Given that the link worked, I guess I did )

-- MeredithLesly - 13 Jul 2006

See a proof of concept.

-- ArthurClemens - 17 Jul 2006

Funnily enough (funny because I suggested it), because I am keen on using the command line editor (emacs) for making incremental changes to .tmpl and .css files, this solution doesn't look like it will work well for me. Another solution would be to edit something like a .tcss file and have twiki compile and compress the constants into it.

Nevertheless, I will give the AttachContentPlugin solution a go and I thank Meredith in accomodating the suggestion that it write out to different files.

Hmm. I reminds me of another plugin. I'll see if I can find it.

-- MartinCleaver - 17 Jul 2006

Ok. http://koala.ilog.fr/twikiirc/bin/irclogger_log/twiki?date=2006-07-22,Sat&sel=922#l918

* PalletisedPatternSkinColors.txt: Prototype implementation. Needs plugin and vars renaming

Prototype implementation. Arthur is working on the descriptions of the variables so that they can be renamed away from T1, BG10 etc

We know there are some hardcoded values as well.

-- MartinCleaver - 22 Jul 2006

http://colr.org is an AJAX colour picker with many cool features. Embedding a live variant of that would be awesome.

-- MartinCleaver - 23 Jul 2006

I have added the color scheme topic to svn. Test topic (a copy) here: PatternSkinColorSettingsDoc. Some further regrouping can probably be done.

See also my test site page where I've put colored blocks. While nice in topic view, when editing the INCLUDE formatting stands in the way of readability. Of course it would be better to have a kind of color editor on the page.

Now it would be nice if AttachContent could create a compressed version, like http://www.cleancss.com/ ...

-- ArthurClemens - 23 Jul 2006

This would also need integration with the background images, currently in templates/stylesdynamic.pattern.tmpl.

-- ArthurClemens - 24 Jul 2006

To do clean integration with bg images in templates, TWiki simply needs to take on board the ideas in TemplatePathIsCounterintuitive

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Jul 2006

I am impressed at your ingenity of the construct:

%INCLUDE{"%TOPIC%" section="colortester" color="%MAIN_BACKGROUND_COLOR%"}%

But... its really ugly compared with what would have been possible had ParameterizedVariables been implemented...

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Jul 2006

By the way... thanks to Arthur and Meredith for their hard work on this!

-- MartinCleaver - 24 Jul 2006

I have not seen any disagreement on this but this topic is from before the 14 day grace period in TWikiRelease04x01Process was decided so I do not evaluate that this is fully closed. And the spec above is a bit "brief".

I have seen at least one checkin related to something like this so I sense it is still living and with some commitment at least from Arthur.

Do I understand it right that some of the proposed change above would require AttachContentPlugin to be included as default?

Will PatternSkin require this or is it optional? If AttachContentPlugin becomes required it will require a release meeting decision. If optional (PatternSkin works fine without) it is a much lesser issue.

Any other updates on this?

-- KennethLavrsen - 27 Sep 2006

I consider it as optional to avoid the dependency on AttachContentPlugin. But I do generate colors.css now from the included topic PatternSkinColorSettings so both files are synched.

-- ArthurClemens - 27 Sep 2006