start > 2006-04-04 > 1

Themes arrive for FinScribe

Created by hww3. Last updated by hww3, 19 years ago. Version #1.

For a while now, I've been aware of the fact that not everyone likes the look of the out of the box theme for FinScribe. Heck, I don't even like it, but I'm busy with other, more important work. The problem has been that, up until today, it's been pretty difficult to change the look and feel without doing some mucking around in the core code. It's true that there was a certain amount of flexibility by changing the stylesheets (ala http://snipsnap.org), but you could only go so far with it.

Just checked into CVS is a set of changes to FinScribe and the underlying Fins framework that makes all of this a thing of the past. To create a new theme, simply copy create a new directory in the themes directory, and start elements of the default theme (currently located in themes/default and templates/) with files created in the new theme directory. You only need to change the files you want to be different, so if you really only want to fiddle with the weblog entry layout, you don't have to copy anything else to your theme. Once you've done that, just change the preference "site.theme" to be the name of the theme directory. Currently, that's the hard part, because there isn't a useful preference editor, so you'll have to use fin_serve in hilfe mode, or edit the database directly. But, it's far more doable than before, and you don't have to worry about really messing things up, because you can just revert to the default theme if things go wrong.

I'll try to get a new release out in the next few days, as this is a big deal. Hopefully some enterprising designers will come up with some new themes that don't look quite as ugly as the default. Well, one can wish, right?

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