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

Forgeot Eric eforgeot at yahoo.fr
Tue Sep 13 16:15:16 CDT 2011


someone posted (off list):

>Hmm, perhaps you could show what you'd do differently?

I'm working on something, but I'm not a special talented designer, and I don't know much about CSS. (I often end up on the same designs)


I'd be happy though to participate to a "contest", a brainstorming or a new group on PmWiki, as someone suggested.


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.

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).

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

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

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)

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



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