Sunday, April 30, 2006

YACD (Yet Another Coding Distraction)

This past week I've been working on creating a theme from some stunning graphics provided for the Sloth III website. There are several points of difficulty I'm running into while applying the theme to the site.

The first is that the graphics provided, while stunning, don't quite cover the spectrum of content types we have on the site. For example, we have a few pages where the entire content is simply a table, such as the list of players online. Of course, I got distracted trying to make them look nicer within the theme by hacking up some of the graphics provided. I had to download and install GIMP to do reasonable amount of editing on images because Microsoft Paint doesn't cut it and Adobe Photoshop costs too much. It doesn't look any better; but, what I did learn is that the code that I put together for the auction module and what I have done so far on the

The second is that the method for creating a theme for Post Nuke CMS isn't well documented (surprise). Yes, there are some documents, but there are undocumented sections of the config file that is required for each theme. That indicates likely one of two things, either the developers haven't gotten to documenting it, or they haven't gotten to coding it. I'd guess the latter since I can't find any examples of anything using the undocumented config settings, but it is time consuming to figure out the useless config sections.

The third point of difficulty is that I haven't finished applying the entire theme before I skipped to modifying a few of the modules. It's a tough choice to figure out the best order of this since, I don't know the best way to make the theme and I don't know the best way to make a module look in a theme, I'm bumbling back and forth between the two. My current lean is to go back to the theme and finish either the two-column or three-column format. So far, I have finished the home page and found that there is one graphic mistake provided to us that I will have to address at some point.

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