The Glade 4.0

I just wanted to thank one of our awesomely proactive and silently brilliant admins for providing us with a slick new gmail dark inspired theme.

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OOO! I LIKE!

It was time for a change anyhow, and it reminds me of that granite or gothic, or whatever that sort of decorative-stone looking one on 3.0 was. I was fond of that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Ooh, very cool.

Hmm, kinda liking Tranquil Teal a bit more, though. Graphite FTW.

Heh. Glad you like it. It's still something of a WIP, though. I keep finding little things wrong with it.

Most of the widgets could stand to be redone entirely. They're just a hastily re-colored version of the ones that came with the Tranquil Teal theme (which is what I started from). Unfortunately I'm really not a widget guy, so that may be stuck on the wish list for awhile.

And maybe it's just me, but all the font sizes seem just a little too small. I think this is partly why bold text in posts is so hard to see. Unfortunately PHPBB apparently applies the styles for [b] tags directly to the element, instead of slapping a class on them. I'm a little limited in what I can do about that particular issue since all the theme stuff is CSS.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I'm just so used to the ranger's green that if it was any different color, it would just feel very weird.

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Ron Paul 2012

Thank you, Stathol. Loves the dark.

Awesome, Stathol I like

I like it so far. Good work!

Could you fix the background color of page numbers when viewed from the general board? It is light blue and should be darker.

I think most of the widgets and such are perfectly fine. I'd only ask that the new posts widget be made the same Manilla Folder color that gmail uses for flagging messages.

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That could be done. The question is how to represent all of the states that PHPBB has for threads/posts. I actually used the "important" flag color you're talking about for forum announcements, and just made up a blue color for stickies. I'm not quite sure how to juggle them.

If you want to be more "authentic" to the gmail dark theme, what it actually does with unread messages is change the background to the same color as the forum headers, but the post icon itself is still the grey unfilled...thingy. Announces and stickies could be distinguished with a different background color, maybe.

As for the buttons, the pagination buttons on the thread index are actually the same color as every other button. Now that you mention it, though, there is sort of an optical illusion going on there. They appear lighter because they're on a darker background. What say you all? Should they all be tweaked to be a hair darker? I just borrowed all the colors directly off of gmail's CSS/images.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Oh, I think you've done awesome stuff already. It's just that Dark Battleship Grey on top of Black can be a bit difficult to discern when I'm on my laptop or a mobile platform and have my backlight scaled down.

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I don't disagree -- I'm just not sure how fix it. It's probably going to be this evening at the earliest that I can mess with again. Maybe I (or someone else) will think of something by then. Basically, you need to way to represent:

read and unread posts
read and unread stickies
read and unread announcements
read and unread forums

And then for posts, stickies, and announcements there are a bunch of other goofy states that no one really cares about like whether the post is "hot", and whether or not you've posted in the thread. But I just handled through little overlays to make things simpler. There's also locked/unlocked status for all of the above, which isn't handled very consistently at all.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I'm working on some mods to the theme that space things out a little more for readability and I'm also getting rid of extraneous info that you don't need on the overview pages. Hopefully we'll ultimately have both a dark and light themed version that everyone can enjoy.

If anyone has any requests of the current Gmail Dark theme, please post here and let me know, I'll see what I can do. Keep in mind I'm mostly tweaking aesthetics and not functionality.

Agreed, I can't use anything but the original green Ranger's Glade theme