History: Roadmap

This is a big picture roadmap of where Tiki themes are going. Not for individual bug reports.

General goals

• Make it easier both for theme designers with Skeleton and for power users with Site identity
  • Seek feedback about Skeleton

There are no reports so far about if this is actually being used. It would be good to know if anyone has actually done a Tiki theme and/or site by starting with Skeleton. Also, it would be good to know what could be improved in the Skeleton idea.

• Tiki themes are much easier to do now

IMO (Gary), it isn't really very hard to do a Tiki theme these days. Someone can easily modify a theme by using a theme option, or can start with an existing theme as a base (the new stylesheets are actually not very big files) and change the CSS properties to quickly come up with a totally new look.

• Why so few themes being offered?

Which leads to the question of why so few people are making themes and offering them to the community. IMO (Gary), it isn't because it is hard to make a Tiki theme. I suspect there are some fundamental differences between the Tiki userbase/"market" and those of, say, Joomla or Wordpress or Xoops that are behind this situation.

• Still, ease the path

Not to say things should be as easy as possible, the docs improved, the methods improved, etc. This is important for the people who are making the themes, whether for the Tiki package or one-offs for specific sites (not for distribution), at least.

To do

• Find a better way to handle print

Questions

• We have duplicate css just for print, are they different? If they are the same, shall we delete?
• Can we reduce the number of css files?
  • lite.css instructions could be moved to layout.css or design.css to reduce the number of css files to maintain and learn
  • why is fixed_width a separate css?
    • Probably this is an artifact that should be corrected.
  • Is admin.css going to be kept and stuff from design moved there?
• A question also is whether multiple CSS files is really a problem, since they can be minified as one file with the Performance option.

Long term dream goals

• TikiThemeGenerator

Won't do

What has been ruled out, and why?