New Template: mAria Cartel

[jackrabbit]

I've "finished" the modifications to the Aria template and named the style mAria Cartel. It's now set as the style you will see unless you specifically choose another.

I say "finished" in quotes since I changed a majority of the icons; nearly every one, but not every one. I also modified the colors for the template so everything *should* look as intended. If you find an obvious icon I missed, find a mistake, or find certain pages hard to read, let me know here and I'll see what I can do.

For the most part, I'm very happy with it. There's blue-on-green in the title of the threads and it's a global setting, actually hard coded into every page of the templates. I decided against a universal find/replace of the color because really I have no idea what else it would effect, and a change like that is easier to make than it is to fix. There's also a yellow bar along the left of the "latest post" if you expand it using this link http://www.martiancartel.com/forum/aria/mc_buttons/collapse_lastpost_collapsed.gif on the main forum list. That color is also hard coded, but I found several things that use it as a hover color, and so a find/replace would break things.

Anyhow, I know some of you hate the new look. It's really too bad you feel that way, but any artist knows it's impossible to make everyone happy. I do hope you find another selectable theme to your liking.

Thanks for your patience in letting me get this done. Next up is the main page (http://www.martiancartel.com/mambo/), and finally, the hand-drawn logo.

[Tai]

I love it. The icons just make it, ours. well done. :thumbup:

[Circuit]

I like it. :)

The only thing left that I see that bugs me is the thin white line sitting on the grey bar above the Martian Cartel Forum logo. Saving the .gif for it, it appears to be on the actual logo and not some color setting on the template somewhere, so hopefully it won't break anything.

Also, does the dark green text on dark a grey background for the 'Forum Tools' and 'Search this Forum' links fall into one of those "break other things" type of deals?

[jackrabbit]

Thanks, Circ. It was meant to continue the whole way across and I simply missed it. :)

Good eye! It should be fixed now.

[Fitty]

pretty :flowerhea

[Harka]

I love the custome icons you have done, great job!

and this is just for Ned

:paddle: :wavey:

[Kermit]

Holy crap dude... this is so much better it's sick. Or da bomb... or Mac... whatever the kids are saying nowadays.

Kudos!

:thumbup:

[Paladin]

It looks great, and I especially like the Martian icons. The "thread locked" one is hysterical. One request though... can you make the white boxes with the dashed lines around "Location", "Number of Posts", etc. go away? Maybe by making the colors match the background or something. It's slightly annoying. Not much. Just slightly.

[Orion]

wow. I love it. very easy on the eyes!

[jackrabbit]

can you make the white boxes with the dashed lines around "Location", "Number of Posts", etc. go away?

Browser just crashed and I lost the post explaining this. so, excuse me a sec... (FUCK!!)

[edit: a SECOND TIME! Luckily, I copied the post to TextPad before hitting "submit" this time. IE does NOT like something on this post. Trying Firefox now]

*sigh*

Where was I? Okay, I spent a few hours on Friday looking for this part of the code. There's nothing I was able to find in the admin panel, but it is directly in the code. The problem with that is I can't make it a setting: keep this, for him, that for her, this for me... It has to be a global change. I find it pretty annoying too, but some of the things I like (postcount, onlinestatus, location) like we had over at QB. I can look into making it smaller, less obnoxious, or trimming some of the fat out of it. The fat is culled from your individual profile, though, so someone with location, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, and AIM contacts (most of us) would have about 3 inches of status crap dedictaed to them.

If you'r reading this while I'm typing, you'll see the whole box is gone. I don't like that look either. So I leave it up to the group to decide what they'd like to see. There's a line for each of the following:
onlinestatus
postcount
location
age
joindate
reputation (currently disabled on our forum)
postfield2 (I haven't the vaguest...)
ICQ
MSN
Aim
Yahoo


mAria,Postbit Templates, postbit_legacy, lines 63-81

[Circuit]

I don't know if you saw my post after I edited it, but is the dark green text on dark grey of the 'Forum Tools' 'Search This Forum' buttons intentional?

Also, filling in all four fields in the Additional Information seems to break it and none of them end up displaying in posts.

**edit: Taking away 3 and leaving the one for Location that I had before is apparently broken, too. I only have the one filled in now and nothing shows up under my avatar besides the "Status" and "Posts" boxes.

**editedit: Although, after further inspection, nobody else's are showing up either. So you're either dinking around with it or I breaked it!

[jackrabbit]

I dinked. only 2 should show, now.

And, no. It's not intentional that it be hard to see, but the damn link color for that bar uses a global. :(

I'll look into fixing that tomorrow.

edit: forgot to disable smilies. Need a fucking hack for that! HATE SMILIES!!! *aneurysm*

[Circuit]

There seriously needs to be an aneurysm smilie.

[Paladin]

I understand it would be a global change JR. I think you misunderstood what I was asking about... it's not the information that bothers me, it's the white box with the dashed black border that does. Maybe you can tweak the colors to match the rest of the template, like a solid green border or something, but I just though making the border and the white match the grey background would be an easy fix. Maybe not. I do understand it isn't something that can be customized per user.

[jackrabbit]

fixed the big, blocky, dashed-border boxes. Now just small text!

[jackrabbit]

is the dark green text on dark grey of the 'Forum Tools' 'Search This Forum' buttons intentional?Fixed.

If we ever decide to change the styles of the site, stuff like this is going to come back and bite me in the ass. :)

2 years from now...
Circuit: The white on yellow "Forum Tools" is hard to see again.
Me: Yeah, it looks like some idiot hard coded the color into the template. Why would anyone do that!

edit: damn smilies!

[Circuit]

You are very rad!