So far building a awesome website for this project has gone good. I have so many ideas that I wanted to do on simplemachines.org, but I just didn't want to break a running thriving community for me to do my ideas. This is basically my area51 :D My version of being locked in a candy shop all night. I got room to show off what SMF is capable of and more importantly what SMFs 2.0 default theme "Curve" can do.
If most of you don't know, I am not a themer. Source code is where I thrive. Yet I have picked up on curve and manipulating it really easy. CSS makes this really nice when you have browser tools like Firebug to help out as well :)
I posted this blog for two reasons. One was to test the blogs showing on our yet to be public homepage :P
The other was to show people a very sleek trick Nas showed me with curve.
If you notice on our About (http://www.simpledesk.net/about/) and other sections, our menus have a neat little look to them. This is achieved by clipping the bottom part of the titlebg or catbg by simpply adding a "height: 25px;" (of course I used css instead of hard coding it) to the h4 class. Then you use the roundframe class in a div and finally below that the lowerframe class in a span with a empty span inside of it (required by curve).
Simple little tweak and it looks awesome. We used titlebg instead of catbg because it has a softer appearance (in terms of colors) and made it flow better. Although our menu buttons do stick out, we will work on those whe we find a solution that doesn't involve editing any of curves files.
My goal so far has been to create the entire site theme without modifying a single file in the curve theme. So that basically means any variant or theme based off curve should work as a site theme here without requiring us to update site files or css to fix things.
That is all.. Now this is posted, I can see how it looks on our new homepage code.
The parts SleePy has left out (too modest):
- Secured our site a LOT more.
- Optimised our code layout
- New site structure in place (before EVERYTHING was an SMF hardcoded action).
- Framework for downloads, and contributions in place.
A big thanks and well done to SleePy!!
Great job indeed, SleePy. :)
I like it! It's very nice indeed. :D
It looks nice in places, but the navigation colors are very hard to see, even if the text is white. Seems awkward and looks like the colors were inverted just for that part.
Yea I know about the bad navigation colors.. I am thinking of a solution for them. I would like them to be soft colored like the rest of the menus. It is a work in progress :)
Speaking of manipulating curve, the SMF Mod Site has started implementing this. Still could use a little more work though. :)
Nice work on the home page :)
Great job, SleePy! You and the rest of the Staff are valuable members of SMF, and I could almost say that without you guys SMF wouldn't be nearly as great as it is right now. Which is why i'm so excited for SimpleDesk. The collaboration of such amazing coders will surely turn out equally amazing work! :D
Sleepy, do we need to credit you if we use this method on our own sites?
tyty1234: I'm not SleePy (Well, I am sleepy, just woke up :P), but I would say that you do not need to credit him. It's already done in atleast two places in Curve (error log, and the message index, though that is a table with another method).
ah i see. never did notice that...'til now. lol.
I take no credit for the code. Nas showed me it and as pointed out it is on smf already.
Do you think you could post the code? ;D