Zukakakina

The last few days I've been updating the new themes at mods.tw.o, to be compatible with Tiki 3, which will be released soon. There are a dozen or so themes that I've made and added to Tiki's Subversion repository, as "aftermarket" themes that can be installed either with the Admin Mods feature or manually via download and ftp transfers. These have been at the Tiki 2 compatibility level, but with Tiki 3 on the way, they need to be brought up to speed.

File reduction

One nice thing is that a number of the themes' template files are no longer needed, since now the default files coincide. So anyone updating these themes at their site should be careful not to just add the new template files, but to remove any files that are left over in the theme template directory from before; they are outdated now. For instance, the absE theme for Tiki 2 has seven template files, mostly for page layout; for Tiki 3, it has only one - the credits.tpl file that contains the theme author information.

New features

It's really cool seeing the old themes brought to life with new Tiki functionality. In particular, I'm happy to see the old PHP Layers menu replaced by CSS (suckerfish) menus. The newer menu method is an option, and PHP Layers can still be used, but I think the consensus will be to use the new, lighter-weight menu method as soon as they are proven in Tiki. And they are already looking really good IMHO, particularly with jquery activated for "Superfish" results.

Speaking of jquery, in Tiki 3 it's available as an "experimental" feature, but is also very solid already in a typical Tiki installation. The motion of module boxes, menu folders, and column hiding/showing is so nice and smooth with jquery that I think it will be very common to see Tiki sites with this activated.

Main theme update points

What I've done so far with the outside themes is remove the redundant template files, and update the CSS (mostly adding CSS for the suckerfish menus, and adding the new button styling). I'll make another pass through the themes to be sure the CSS validates, and to check for miscellaneous updates, etc. that are needed.

Tikipedia longing for Pagecontrols

Tikipedia is the last of the themes to go through the initial Tiki2 to 3 update, because it requires the most work. It has several template files that position the tabs at the page top Mediawiki-style and so on, and it takes time to make these edits. The work in the ui-revamp experimental branch would have been great for Tikipedia, I was thinking, because the optional tabs interface would probably have been an easier way to implement the Mediawiki look, but the Pagecontrols feature didn't make it into this branch or release. So I'm back to kludging the implementation by manually moving things around in the templates. This should be finished today or tomorrow.