30 September 2013, 20:33

Hello,

[sorry for the cross-posting]

In case you don't see the news forum message, we published the Mahara 1.8 release candidate 1 today for you to give it a thorough check.

Please see https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=5739 for more information.

Cheers

Kristina

01 October 2013, 2:59

Hi,

Can I leave some feedback on the skins feature here? I think this is going to be a really useful feature for our users and I am really grateful for all Gregor's work on it, and all the other contributors'.

I did want to go into 'critical friend' mode though and say that I think all the functionality is there, but I find the implementation confusing. If you enable skins, you then have both skins and themes when editing a page. I foresee this causing a lot of confusion with users.

I suggested long ago that I thought there should just be one term - 'themes', possibly 'site themes' and 'page themes' for clarity if required - and I'm still sticking by that ;)

I think it would be a lot more logical to have one term and one place in the interface for setting themes / skins. Probably not a popular observation to make at this stage as I know it takes a lot of work to get a complex feature like this to this stage of development ;)

(Some more context - things are a bit simpler on our implementation of Mahara because we've set it up so that users can't change the site theme - they only have control over the theme for their pages.
But I realise that you have to support site themes too in your release.)

I would be interested to hear what others think.

Anyway I'm looking forward to offering this feature to our users!

Cheers,
Mike

P.S. For us I suppose it is fairly straightforward as we don't allow the site theme to be changed - we can just show users the skins option and hide the themes option. Confusing if you want to offer both options though.

01 October 2013, 18:49

Hi Mike,

I read your post and I think that your proposition is very sensible. Restrospectively I also prefer to talk about site - institution theme and page theme instead of skin.

It also will be more easy to translate the concept into other languages.

So +1 for me on this.

Cheers,

-dajan

01 October 2013, 20:38

Hello Mike and dajan,

Thank you very much for your feedback on skins vs. page themes. At this stage, we will not be able to make changes for Mahara 1.8. Skins and page themes are different because the former you can change whereas the latter you can't. I imagine that page themes will become less important in the future as you have much more control with skins. And if you want to browse the site in any theme, the site admin can allow that.

Skins is an experimental feature for a number of reasons and the potential confusion with page themes is one of them. So yes, this needs to be discussed further on how to go forward with skins for 1.9 or later. Although there are a few gnarly points, we did want to publish skins in 1.8 because it's been a long time in the making and both Gregor as well as our developers at Catalyst did a great job writing the functionality and then also getting it ready for core Mahara.

We've seen that skins don't work well with all themes. As you can pretty much change everything in a skin, but not the navigation bar, these can clash. Depending on the underlying theme for the page, there may be bigger problems. Thus, people using skins will need to be discerning.

We were thinking that it might be a good idea to have a theme that would work well with skins as base theme so that the navigation bar is in a neutral color for example. The width and the containers that are changed may also be problematic depending on the theme.

Cheers

Kristina

02 October 2013, 12:03

I agree that it is confusing to offer both "page themes" and "page skins" to users. It would be good, for 1.9, if we could figure out a more integrated way of showing these settings to the user.

On the back-end, there is a big technical difference between them -- the "theme" in Mahara has a lot more power than the "skin", because the theme can override any of the page templates, changing what final HTML gets delivered. In contrast, the skin's only effect is to add one more CSS stylesheet to the page.

I should point out, the CSS stylesheet generated by the skin, is actually a Dwoo template, like any other Mahara page. This means that the theme gets a chance to customize it. So, that's a powerful way for any existing theme to be made more skin-friendly -- the theme itself can say "this element should get the skin's background-color, and this element should get the skin's header font color", and so forth. A theme could even just return an empty page for the skin stylesheet, ignoring skins altogether, if the theme designer was really anti-skin.

Cheers,

Aaron