New GregCustom Theme

[NorfolkGreg]

I've just uploaded a new theme. Check it out at:
https://github.com/NorfolkGreg/GregCust ... /README.md

It's based on the one I'm using for my site, currently at:
htt ps://gregchapman.me.uk/wondercms/home
I may yet move it to
https://gregchapman.uk/index.php
where the original hand-coded version is.
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EDIT: The Wcms version is now at: https://gregchapman.uk/index.php
It's running a customised version of the GregCustom theme.
You'll now get a 404 at the original .me.uk address.
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It's my first attempt at sharing one with the Wcms community, so I regard it as ripe for improvement at the moment. That's because I'm almost totally self taught. My only computing qualification was a "Data Processing" module as part of a day release "Business Studies" course taken in the 1970s.

Here are some of my thoughts...

Is it better to do as SKY does, and included downloaded copies of the fonts used or is it acceptable/better to use links to Google fonts in the theme.php file?

You'll realise, from looking at the preview images, that all text above the menu bar is taken from fields on the "Settings > Menu" and "Settings > Current Page" screens. The "contents" field certainly isn't meant to be as short as you have to make them to be used in the header. While I would much prefer to use the <?= $Wcms->block('subside') ?> structure to act as the header block, until Wcms' index.php file is reworked that would leave it with extremely confusing content, but you'll have seen I've got a Wish List post discussing that.

You'll also see from that wish list that I also haven't found a satisfactory way to handle menus that are at sub-page level. Hover menus are ok at the top level but once dropdown are involved, they become very messy. Is that just me and my lack of properly programmer training? Is there any current theme which has a touch-screen friendly menu system once sub-pages are added?

[NorfolkGreg]

I've now updated the theme to 0.0.2 !

I've tweaked the theme.php file and added more hooks in the CSS that allow you to change the colour scheme. This is done through a list of variables at the top of the file that make it very easy to change.

I've also added a "resources" folder to the theme. This currently includes a file of hints and tips on how to use the variables and a couple of sample sets of variable lists that, pasted into the style.css file to produce the two variations seen below.





You will also find a couple of sample background images (They're a bit rudimentary) that help demonstrate how images can replace the plain colours of the default theme. I plan to add a few more more "artistic" images. I'd welcome submissions of both background images and and variable sets to include in future versions of the theme.

Oops! Just realised I haven't quite finished the coding to place the background images so they do what I plan they should do. Wait for a further message before testing!

[NorfolkGreg]

Update!
Coding sorted!
But I'm still to produce further header background images and document their use more fully.

[wiz]

Hello Greg, thanks for all your efforts.

Been extremely busy lately, I promise to get back to this, review it and most likely add it to the list of publicly available templates through wcms

[NorfolkGreg]

Many thanks, wiz. I look forward to seeing what you think, and what I may need to change to make it acceptable as an official add-on.

I have just upload a version 0.0.3.

This moves all the samples files to the "resources" folder so it can now be downloaded to be kept locally and deleted from the server as its contents are not needed for the theme to function.

There is added material in the resources folder, a tweaked sample colour scheme suggestion, and an much expanded "ReadMe.txt" to help novice users of WonderCMS customise the theme. so they could produce something more like this:



I'm sure they are other minor improvements that I've forgotten to note.

[NorfolkGreg]

I have just uploaded version 0.0.4

This minor update adds three classes that can be applied to <p> tags to provide captions to images together with the variables to set the colour to be applied to the text and backgrounds of the captions, as explained in the updated README.md file.

While making the upload to GitHub I discovered that I may have failed to upload some of the material to the resources folder that I claimed to be there with the 0.0.3 version. Any previously missing files are now in place.

My own installation of the theme, found at https://gregchapman.uk is currently running with the "LightMono" colours mentioned in the ReadMe.txt file found it the "Resources" folder. It also have a couple of further classes added to handle the "thumbnails" used in the "Games" section of the site. I've begun to add a section that covers my explorations of WonderCMS. I'd welcome any feedback, suggested improvements and corrections, to the material found in that section.

[NorfolkGreg]

I have just uploaded version 0.0.5 to https://github.com/NorfolkGreg/GregCustom

It's perhaps worth saying, and I should have said this before, the user I have in mind for this theme is the novice webmaster, not a pro pulling together a complete site that the client will then update from time to time.

The most obvious change is that I've altered the default colour scheme to the "LightMono" introduced in v0.0.4. The previous colour scheme is now referred to as "OriginalDark" and its settings now appear in the "ReadMe.txt" file.

wcmslive.png (38.03 KiB) Viewed 595 times

The settings for another colour scheme have been added to the file at the same time. I call this one "CaribbeanBlue". It's the first to blend the Page description line of the header with the site and Page titles.

schemecaribbeanblue.png (39.74 KiB) Viewed 595 times

Oops! Just realised I left my "TestPage" visible in those images!

More code has been added to the CSS file. This controls the appearance of the HTML5 video and audio players as I thought some novice web masters might struggle with that aspect. The audio player should now fill the available width. Videos do the same and now have a similar border to images. There's information in the Resource's ReadMe file to help new web masters take advantage of the new code when adding their own videos or embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos in their sites.

I continue to expand my own site at https://gregchapman.uk/wondercms/ with material that I hope will help new users of WonderCMS. The next section I plan to expand is one on external text editors. Apart from Windows, I think I can cover suggestions for Android, ChromeOS and, perhaps, Linux, but I'm guessing that if you're using that you've probably got your own preferred editor already. I'm not an Apple user, so IOS and Mac software is something I'll need if the site is to help those users.

Currently, all that section includes is an introduction to a small, portable, external editor for Windows that I think is admirably suitable for novices, if they plan to build sites with no more than a handful of pages. I'm even hoping to have a customised version available to download soon, that will ease the business of inserting the more complex tags into their sites. See: https://gregchapman.uk/wondercms/texteditors for where I'm up to with that.