[pmwiki-users] It's time to change pmwiki default skin!

Rogutės Sparnuotos rogutes at googlemail.com
Wed Sep 14 00:58:00 CDT 2011


Forgeot Eric (2011-09-13 22:15):
<...>
> Again, I don't necessary thing everything should be redesigned, but a few adjustement could help to look better. The geany website (powered by PmWiki) is a good example of an attractive design, yet quite close to the original : http://geany.org/ . There are still blue links, but it's not  color:blue; . It's not perfect (followed links are not noticeable, it's still using tables), but it doesn't give a bad first impression.

The fixed width and centered box at geany.org looks kind of squeezed even
with 1280x1024 resolution. The colors need more contrast: dark-gray on
light-gray for text and soft-blue on light-gray for links isn't good for
the eyes. Moreover, pmwiki.org skin adapts better to smaller widths, and
it only needs 'max-width: 60em;' on #wikitext to adapt better to wide
screens (and perhaps some tuning to padding).

> Also I don't think the default design is **that** easy to configurate, especially because of the tables which are probably necessary to remove (I don't find they render good in text based browsers, in links it's ok, but not in lynx).

I didn't find it that easy to configure either. But I have a bad habit of
starting from scratch...

> Also the menu is called wikileft, which needs to be renamed if the user wishes to put it on the right.

Yes, a skin update would do good to rename it to wikinav, wikiside or
something.

> The reference to microsoft-only fonts could be avoided: arial, verdana. Serif, sans-serif could be enough.

Yes, and a comment could point to pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Fonts, which
could point to google.com/webfonts :)

> I'd suggest to use a sans-serif for the menu, and a serif for the content, because serif is easier to read when there is lots of text (but this could be discussed)

It really depends on the font and the text size, not on font type.

> A fixed width, centered text area could be more readable for bigger screens. For smaller ones, the current theme is not adapted, in particular because of the left menu: on my phone, I have to scroll to be able to read the text. For helping people reading from a mobile phone or small screen, it's better to use this kind of recipe: http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/DetectMobile together with this kind of skin (I've made a derivative for my websites): http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/IPMWikiSkin

If #wikileft were floated, you would still have to scroll, but vertically
instead of horizontally. Not sure which is easier with mobile browsers.
I think that the default skin shouldn't resort to user agent sniffing (ala
DetectMobile), but it could try to adapt better with CSS.

-- 
--  Rogutės Sparnuotos



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