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View Themes
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Sat, 08 Aug 2009, 8:02 AM
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Hi guys. I was bored, so I implemented View themes. I know this is a feature a lot of people are asking for, and it seemed easy enough to do, so I did it instead of going outside and playing on my Saturday Please, if you have a few minutes, try it out here: http://view-themes.dev.mahara.org/ That site uses the default theme, I changed the admin user's profile theme - http://view-themes.dev.mahara.org/user/view.php?id=1 You can change the theme for any of your views, including your profile view. Anyone looking at your view will see it using that theme. I think that I want to develop another set of patches to get rid of much of the "noise" at the top of a view. E.g., the navigation. Perhaps just cut it right back to a narrow bar at the top of the screen that basically says "you are looking at a view on [sitename]", with a button to go back to wherever you were. That way, maximum space is provided for the view content. Any feedback is most welcome! |
Re: View Themes |
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Sun, 09 Aug 2009, 4:56 PM
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Hi Nigel Looks good, summer is coming! There is also noise directly under the menu that goes across the whole page. The mahara logo, menu, search and heading filler could be combined on one line to save a bit more space. Simplifying the menus appearing for views is a good idea. cheers |
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Mon, 17 Aug 2009, 3:16 AM
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Sounds great, Nigel. You wrote "You can change the theme for any of your views, including your profile
view. Anyone looking at your view will see it using that theme." Is that only generally speaking or can anybody do that on the development system? I registered, but I don't see any buttons in my profile or the views where I could change the theme. Am I not seeing the forest for the trees? |
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Mon, 17 Aug 2009, 6:56 PM
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Anyone can do it, but I think you have to do it when you're looking at the View (as opposed to editing it). I originally implemented it so you could change it on the View Edit screen, but that had some behavioural issues we didn't like, so Richard moved it around a bit. But it doesn't seem to matter where we put it, we can't make it have the behaviour we're looking for The problem is that we don't like how when a profile view has changed the theme, this changes the theme of the entire page, including the navigation. We'd rather that the navigation stayed with the same theme, while only the View changed style. The problem is, we tried implementing that with an iframe and ran into height calculation problems. Currently, our thoughts are that when we reshuffle the menus as part of the usability work, it'll make the top of the page a lot cleaner, which will make changing the theme less of an issue. So maybe we can include it for 1.3 instead. |
. As a result, I'm not sure this will get into Mahara 1.2.Re: View Themes |
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Tue, 18 Aug 2009, 1:25 AM
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Hi Nigel, Now I saw it. I would not have expected the theme changer to be on the regular view page because I think of changing themes from the creator's point of view and not from the viewer's. I liked the small "Edit" button. Less obtrusive and very elegant. However, the theme would not change. :-( The page seemed to have finished loading, but was still looking for some non-existing feedback. Maybe that is the problem why the themes are not loaded. It would be great to have such a theme changer as that goes into the direction of what we would like to see with our "personalization" of the design of portfolio views: allow students to choose the colors / design templates for their views. Question: Would the owner of the view be able to make a specific theme "stick", i.e. specify a certain theme for a view and then no viewer would be able to change it? Kristina |
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Tue, 18 Aug 2009, 3:00 AM
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"However, the theme would not change. I have the same issue |
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Tue, 18 Aug 2009, 5:33 PM
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Yeah, I liked it better on the view edit page too I think the theme may have been changing, but it only changes inside the iframe, which is much harder to spot. To be honest, I think I'd rather the entire page changed. I'll talk to Richard about it again and see what he thinks. Regarding the view theme sticking - yes, that's exactly the behaviour it has. If the owner sets the theme to X, then everyone sees it in theme X. |
Re: View Themes |
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Wed, 19 Aug 2009, 7:13 AM
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"Regarding the view theme sticking - yes, that's exactly the behaviour it has. If the owner sets the theme to X, then everyone sees it in theme X." I think I misunderstood you earlier, Nigel, when you wrote "Anyone can change it". I thought, as the button was implemented in the regular view and not the edit page that really anyone, thus also the tutor, other students etc. with access to the view could change the design. However, I now see that you only meant anyone as in any owner of the view. That definitely makes more sense, but then the button should go into the edit mode if somehow possible so that all the edit functions are there. Kristina |
Re: View Themes |
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Wed, 19 Aug 2009, 11:45 PM
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Yeah, "anyone can change it" was meant to mean "any owner of a view" - my mistake. I have now reverted the view-themes demo site to where I left it, with the selector on the view editing screen. So when looking at a View, you don't see the nice bar at the top that Richard did, but the selector is back. Thoughts welcome. I had a discussion about this with Richard yesterday. Over the weekend, I'm going to try a new change to it - I'm going to make it so that people's profile views display just like normal views. This will take away some of the issues with the navigation changing, and it will suggest changes we could make to the bar at the top of views in terms of more navigation. I'll also make the ability to change themes a site wide setting, a nod to those who want the old, bland portfolio look back Once I've done that, I'll update this thread, and see what everyone thinks. |
Re: View Themes |
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Fri, 21 Aug 2009, 5:40 AM
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Hi Nigel, Having the theme selector on the View page is better in my opinion. And: It works there for me. An issue comes to mind now that I saw the theme selector on the "Edit this view" page: When I saw the selector there, I briefly thought it should go in the "Edit view details" page because you change it once and then it is done with. However, that does not make sense because all design issues (also number of columns) are handled on the "Edit this view" page. But that actually prompted me to think about "Edit view details". Is that a good description or would something like "Edit view properties" / "Edit view description" be more precise? However, "Edit view properties" may pose a problem because the "view access" is separate from the metadata. Maybe I see something where there is nothing amiss? Kristina |
Re: View Themes |
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Sat, 22 Aug 2009, 1:17 AM
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Hi, A selector for users to set what theme they see is something we should do too. I might give it a go, though it will definitely be disable-able on a site and institution level I think, as some institutions may want to force themes to be branded their way. I think you are partially seeing a deeper problem that we have with the usability of View creation at the moment. We've come to the conclusion that having all three of those screens is very likely too many. We've been thinking about several ways to cut down on the number of screens, and improve those remaining - well to be fair, Ray Merrill has been, while we've (as always) been thrilled with his suggestions |
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Sat, 22 Aug 2009, 1:51 PM
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Hi Nigel, "though it will definitely be disable-able on a site and institution
level I think, as some institutions may want to force themes to be
branded their way" "We've been thinking about several ways to cut down on the number of screens" I'm looking forward to the usability changes you are implementing. Kristina |
Re: View Themes |
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Wed, 24 Feb 2010, 3:30 PM
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The ability to change the theme for a specific view is a great feature. The demo site looks great. Is this feature on hold for 1.3? Is there any way I can hack a 1.23 site to have this feature? Thanks from a Mahara newbie. |
Re: View Themes |
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Mon, 29 Mar 2010, 7:45 AM
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I am just setting up an evaluation of Mahara with a group of students and after demoing it to the lecturer the first thing that she asked was how do the students choose a style. The lecturer felt that the way to engage the students was to allow them to pick the appearance and that this was more important than the students having control over content or access to views. The lecturer felt that for students, selecting the appearance made them feel that they had "ownership" more so than the view containing items that they had created. The lack of changing themes meant that the students had to conform to the corporate standard. To a certain degree I can see her point as I have witnessed many students on MySpace or various other social sites spending hours on the appearance without there being any discernable content. If there was a way of patching this into the current version of Mahara I would quite happily beta test it. |
Re: View Themes |
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Mon, 29 Mar 2010, 5:15 PM
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Hi Matthew, Currently your only easy options are to install from the master branch (http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/archive-tarball/master), or to test it on our dev site http://master.dev.mahara.org. That's because it's a bit of a hassle to pick out all the commits related to view themes and apply them to 1.2. The upside of using master is that you'll get some other new stuff too, like atom feeds for blogs, profile icons fetched from gravatar.com, a recent forum posts block, real name searching, automatic disabling of user email addresses after lots of bounces, and other stuff I've forgotten about. We've got a lot of other new features nearly ready to go in too. R. |
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Mon, 29 Mar 2010, 7:34 PM
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Hi Matthew, Just to clarify about those demo sites: we have a few, and most are not very up to date. demo.mahara.org is usually the most recent stable release. dev.mahara.org is supposed to be the latest unstable release, but we haven't been doing releases on the unstable (master) branch since 1.2, so I suspect that site is now older than demo.mahara.org! We should probably close it down until we do another unstable release. master.dev.mahara.org is not fully up to date, but it's usually pretty close. The theming for views feature is a little strange and we may still change it a bit before 1.3. You need to turn it on as Administrator in the Site Options area, and if you do, I recommend turning the 'small view headers' setting on too. That's because if you have the full header with all the navigation, and you change pages to a view with a different theme, it can be quite jarring seeing the navigation jump around to reflect the new theme (at least that's the case with the standard Mahara themes -- if you only use your own custom themes that all have similar page headers then it may not be a problem). R. |