Mailing List Archive

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Christopher X. Candreva
<chris@westnet.com> wrote:
>
> Thank you to Robert for your latest comments in my Retro-wide ticket
> http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/7533
>

No problem, thank you for sticking with it.

> I had some questions that seemed more appropriate here then on the ticket.
>
> Based on your earlier comments, I have been looking at the files in /default
> and /default-wide as  libraries to use. From what you say now that doesn't
> seem to be the case. Is it more they are fall-backs, then libraries to use ?
>

Correct. default and default-wide are not meant to be reference
themes, because they are not strictly speaking themes unto themselves,
but fallback screens. When a plugin gets installed (see
$anyplugin/theme/) it installs a copy of its default theme file into
default and default. So an unadulterated copy of default will only
have a few theme files, but once you've installed all the plugins,
they will all appear there.

>
> I'm probably bringing to themeing concepts from a web CMS I use (Zikula). In
> that system, you only over-ride specific templates, by copying them from a
> master area to a site-specific area. Anything you don't want to change you
> don't need to copy, and being the web many changes can be made in CSS
> instead. I suppose I looked at ui.xml as a style sheet.
>

ui.xml is a legacy file that you should mostly ignore. In pre-MythUI
themes it held most of the theme-- now it exists in themes only to
catch the one or two screens in the frontend that haven't had a
conversion. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is
schdiff, but there may be one or two more still.

You're not necessarily looking at it incorrectly, as by changing
widgets you can and do change the look and feel of the theme-- that
said, from a policy perspective we are probably looking for something
a little more differentiated from default/default-wide when possible.
Those screens were mostly made up on the fly to cram necessary widgets
in to (and with little regard in some cases to attractive layout) so
if they bear any resemblance to Retro of olde, it's probably mostly
coincidence. There are a fair number (at least a dozen or two)
windows that didn't exist in .21 to copy from the old Retro, so that
might be a good opportunity to show some creativity. Regarding the
existing screens, I think we're going to want to see at least some
layout or function changes from default.

Robert
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On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Robert McNamara wrote:

> > don't need to copy, and being the web many changes can be made in CSS
> > instead. I suppose I looked at ui.xml as a style sheet.
> >
>
> ui.xml is a legacy file that you should mostly ignore. In pre-MythUI

Sorry, doing this from memory. I should have said base.xml is where I did
most of the changes and treated as a style sheet.


==========================================================
Chris Candreva -- chris@westnet.com -- (914) 948-3162
WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
http://www.westnet.com/
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On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:20 AM, Christopher X. Candreva
<chris@westnet.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Robert McNamara wrote:
>
>> > don't need to copy, and being the web many changes can be made in CSS
>> > instead. I suppose I looked at ui.xml as a style sheet.
>> >
>>
>> ui.xml is a legacy file that you should mostly ignore.  In pre-MythUI
>
> Sorry, doing this from memory. I should have said base.xml is where I did
> most of the changes and treated as a style sheet.
>

In that case, yep, base.xml is very much like that, you have exactly
the right idea.

Robert
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On Wednesday 25 Nov 2009 18:16:07 Robert McNamara wrote:
> You're not necessarily looking at it incorrectly, as by changing
> widgets you can and do change the look and feel of the theme-- that
> said, from a policy perspective we are probably looking for something
> a little more differentiated from default/default-wide when possible.
> Those screens were mostly made up on the fly to cram necessary widgets
> in to (and with little regard in some cases to attractive layout) so
> if they bear any resemblance to Retro of olde, it's probably mostly
> coincidence.

It's important to note at this point that default/default-wide could change to
be very different to how they appear now, if that ever happens then any theme
that relies on falling back to them is no longer going to appear as desired
and may even break.

Defaults should be treated at last ditch "if all else fails then this is what
we display" screens. Themes should not rely on them. Mythcenter in 0.22 does,
but only because it was felt necessary to keep at least one old theme around
for continuity reasons and no-one had time to do it properly.

--
Stuart Morgan
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On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Stuart Morgan wrote:

> Defaults should be treated at last ditch "if all else fails then this is what
> we display" screens. Themes should not rely on them. Mythcenter in 0.22 does,

Thank you ! That's my answer - pretty much the antithesis of a "Library".
:-)


==========================================================
Chris Candreva -- chris@westnet.com -- (914) 948-3162
WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
http://www.westnet.com/
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I found the extranious background image. It was default/background.png

The problem resulted from moving my background to a subdir and not updating
all the references, in this case ones that were in the <fanart /> section

This background.png showed up as black -- unless you open it in something
like Gimp that shows alpha layers.

Is there a debug switch that would print to STDOUT each image it opens, the
way it does for theme .xml files ?

==========================================================
Chris Candreva -- chris@westnet.com -- (914) 948-3162
WestNet Internet Services of Westchester
http://www.westnet.com/
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