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Help me trial an MT5 theme

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Hi chaps,

Nearly finished my first MT theme/template set and wondered if anyone wanted to help me test it out and give me some feedback?

You can visit my test implementation here:
http://cloud.richardbenson.co.uk/richardbensoncouk/

NB: the "elsewhere" tab is not complete.

"Personal" and "Work" are sub-blogs, the pages are stored in the master "site". Colours of the theme are set at the blog level.

There are eventually going to be three themes in this set, the aggregating "site", a blog theme, and an action stream based theme.

There's all sorts of common templates threading through them, so they should really be used as a set.

At this stage I would really appreciate some feedback on what's good, what's not so good and what's missing. When I've got that down a bit more, I'll stick it in a zip for people to trial on their own MT5 installations.

If it works out, I could end up making a few more themes from freecsstemplates.org, as they rock!

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  • Richard - This is exciting! I'm finishing up the docs for MT5 Themes now. Would be great if you could proof-read them based upon your experience thusfar. Might you be putting your theme on GitHub or somewhere public such that others can contribute?

    • Maybe, if i ever get my head around Git. I'm on Windows so it's a pain to use git over SVN. I have my own SVN server, so I may add it to that. But yeah, when it's nearer to "ready" I will share more of it.

      To be honest, I started making a theme the normal way, then used the theme export tool then started ripping it apart and comparing with the included themes, so be interesting to know the "proper" way to do it! Is there a way to include sample pages in themes as there is in template sets?

      I'm most excited about my plans for the "elsewhere" theme, but it's by far the most complicated one, as it's all based around complex action stream templates, it's not designed for any entries or pages.

      The themes will support 1 to n blogs although the title bar can't realistically fit more than 7 items, so you will need to balance folders and blogs with that.

  • Looks like commenting in sub-blogs is broken, will have a look at that.

    Also Chrome is generating an error "Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL" in the JS, but it's the stock MT JS file with a couple of lines added for the YUI RTE, so makes little sense to me right now!

  • And preview comments too, that's just because I never ever tried that :)

  • This is awesome ! Please try the yaml code below to insert default pages to the theme.

        elements:
            default_folders:
                importer: default_folders
                name: Default Folders
                component: core
                data:
                    about:
                        label: 
                    service:
                        label: 
    
    

    default_pages:
    importer: default_pages
    name: Default Pages
    component: core
    data:
    about:
    basename: index
    title: TITLE OF YOUR PAGE
    text: DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PAGE
    tags:
    folder: about

  • Commenting should be fixed now, and some other tweaks here and there.

    Have added the default pages and put theme to an SVN server for now:
    https://server.richardbenson.co.uk:8443/svn/public/mt-flowerily/trunk/

    There's still more to be done before it's worth packaging into a zip or similar.

    Current to-do list is something like the following:
    * Remove erroneous templates not used in sub-themes
    * Comment previewing
    * Comment landing page
    * RSS icons on subscriptions
    * CSS for images
    * Stlyecatcher for colour variations (use the mt var in the header for now)
    * Move static files to the new official theme space

    There's probably loads more! :)

    Would *really* appreciate it if anyone fancies installing the theme on their own install.

    Thanks

  • * Stlyecatcher for colour variations (use the mt var in the header for now)
    * Move static files to the new official theme space

    DONE

  • Richard, when importing your themes (especially flowerily) to a non-english install there seems to be some "translation" of template names. "HTML Head" becomes "HTML-Kopf" in German and therefore it is impossible to publish the site.
    Is this some MT5 bug or something you can fix with some clever yaml-code (no translation of template names or such).

    Used RC3 for my tests.

  • Interesting! I will have a look at that.

    Not done much with it for a while as have been stupidly busy at home and work, but moved it to GitHub (because everyone else seems to be so I better learn it!)
    http://github.com/richardbenson/mt5-theme-flowerily

  • Hm, it seems there were also a lot of templates missing. Maybe it's not just a language thing but something bigger. I'll keep you posted if I find out anything else. For now (and especially for me, being an MT noob) it seems very tedious to get any other than the shipping templates to work, though.

  • Oh yeah, it's totally not finished and needs a lot of tidying up, there's bound to be templates in there that aren't needed any more. I'm going to have to ditch the action streams section as it appears that's not coming in the final release of MT5.

    That said, it should all build without errors, you just can't preview comments and a few other tiny things.

    I'll update here when it's actually finished!

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