SMF default core theme must be Multi Color

[Sincere]

Hello.

I am thankful to all the kind developers and designers of smf who generously provided helpful explanations about what important features must be in a default theme.

With this in mind, I would like to make in this topic my final request on the issue of the default theme.

Principle behind my request:
**********************
No matter how beautiful a theme is, it is still a choice the team would impose upon all the webmasters who choose to use SMF.

How come? It is easy to install additional themes!

Yes, but many mods only install for the default theme and thus the need of a multicolor theme.

Imposing the developers choice of color of the default theme is not in line with the spirit of SMF, I am confident it is not.

Fourty years after May 1968, we are still fed up of laws and rules and choices being imposed on the young generations. We want more freedom! We want to choose! We want to allow every member and guest on our boards to CHOOSE his or her preferred color. We must not allow ourselves to impose our own choices of colors on them simply because we are offering a service they need.

THUS, I am making my request here on the SMF Feature Request Forum:

I would like to see SMF2.0 more democratic, and in this regard, every member and guest must easily with one single click on the top of any page on the forums open a small window with a color palette like the one I am attaching here (this one is from Word, what everyone knows.... )

With a second click the choice of colors the user or guest made should be used in the default theme.

Fellow webmasters, please back my request here by voting above. Please feel free to vote against my request, but please do vote, do have your say, do express yourself.

Fellow webmasters, please back my request. Please vote YES and pledge to renew your charter membership if the SMF team adopts our suggestion here.

I kindly ask the moderators to announce this topic by email to all the members.

[Deaks]

it wont be announced, and a multi color version is easy to add yourself

Default Multicolor yes its for 1.1 but im sure the author will update it for smf2 when smf 2 is stable!

[babjusi]

@Sincere, I voted against your idea. Cause I think that the default theme looks very nice and if someone wants to change it, then it can be done on e personal basis by installing the custom theme that RunicWarrior posted above. And from what I gather, your main reason to have that theme included as a default theme, has nothing to do with freedom of chooise or smf being democratic, which it is and very much so. But it has to do with the installation of mods. In the new 2.0, all mods will be installed automatically on the custom themes as well, so you got nothing to worry about. And if some mod won''t, then you have always the mod parser

[Sincere]

it wont be announced, and a multi color version is easy to add yourself

Default Multicolor yes its for 1.1 but im sure the author will update it for smf2 when smf 2 is stable!

Man! You guys in the smf dev team are really psychological cases to study: even when you have good news, you still love to start with something negative and you love to put it as abruptly as possible....

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Seriously, I think the whole software is based muchly on the fact that it is easy to customize, and any color changes etc. you can pretty much do yourself with very little tech skills required.
All you need, is a little time, basic understanding of the template system and css, and perhaps google.

When you speek of freedom of choice, you actually speak of freedom to choose like you. Not a real freedom is it?

[Sincere]

Seriously, I think the whole software is based muchly on the fact that it is easy to customize, and any color changes etc. you can pretty much do yourself with very little tech skills required.
All you need, is a little time, basic understanding of the template system and css, and perhaps google.

When you speek of freedom of choice, you actually speak of freedom to choose like you. Not a real freedom is it?

your opinion is not more than that : your opinion

Let everyone vote......

that 's what matters......

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

your opinion is not more than that : your opinion

I know. This is all about opinion after all, you've told yours, I told you mine.

[Eliana Tamerin]

Sincere, stop putting down the people who don't agree with you without reasoning. I asked for some in the last thread, and you gave me none. I gave you a huge post worth's of reasoning, and then you took it and lashed out because I called the request childish (not you, mind, although I'm feeling close to it now).

I voted against this, because, like Lex, I know how customizable SMF is. It's easy to download and install one of the many themes available on the theme site, or change the themes yourself.

[Sincere]

Sincere, stop putting down the people who don't agree with you without reasoning. I asked for some in the last thread, and you gave me none. I gave you a huge post worth's of reasoning, and then you took it and lashed out because I called the request childish (not you, mind, although I'm feeling close to it now).

I voted against this, because, like Lex, I know how customizable SMF is. It's easy to download and install one of the many themes available on the theme site, or change the themes yourself.

I have enough personal power to totally disregard your worthless comments about my posts.

It is your right to disagree with me and to vote against my request. Thank you for having expressed yourself.

If the SMF dev team is honest about respecting their members desires, let them announce this poll......

[joe1234]

Man! You guys in the smf dev team are really psychological cases to study: even when you have good news, you still love to start with something negative and you love to put it as abruptly as possible....

I sure am glad that I am not the only one thinking the same thing 

[joe1234]

I think that the point Sincere and I are trying to make are these:

SMF currently has what, 3 built-in themes?     So SMF IS changing themes over time and making one the default theme.   

Why is SMF choosing 1 of 3 ship themes as the default?   Because SMF thinks the others look uglier - plain and simple.    SMF will come back saying all 3 themes are great and one (the current default) is better.

Now that we got that out of the way, the fact that SMF IS picking themes over others.     The argument presented by Sincere which I back-up is simply this:

Let the SMF user base PICK the theme they believe is the best one.    It may not even be the Dilber Theme, it may be some other theme, but the point is the same.

From the popularity of Dilber Theme, I would suspect that if users had a choice for the SMF default theme, that this would be it.     

The first question that needs to be answer before going any further however is whether SMF (3-5 people?) wants to pick a theme or let the SMF user base (thousands of users) pick?

[karlbenson]

Interesting read
The Default theme has to be generic, in order that it be customized easily enough.

As for color. It would be a task to colorize all the images for each shade.
Whilst I wouldn't mind seeing a few shades. It should be as possible for it to be as a theme in the theme site.
Even installing mods on all themes should be easier in 2.x with attempting to install on all themes.

[Sincere]

Interesting read
The Default theme has to be generic, in order that it be customized easily enough.

As for color. It would be a task to colorize all the images for each shade.
Whilst I wouldn't mind someing a few shades. It should be as possible for it to be as a theme in the theme site.
Even installing mods on all themes should be easier in 2.x with attempting to install on all themes.

thank you for your kind feedback karl

Harzem, one single person (and one who is not getting any part of the Charter membership money) did on his own more than 5 shades for his theme.

Is not the SMF team able to match the effort of one single non-paid person and provide a multicolor default theme ?

[Deaks]

sincere ive done multi-color variations for my mimic theme ... wow so has Harzem, so has Gazmanafc, so has Bloc so has Fussilet, but where is option for our multi-color themes ... end of day Dilber wont be added now drop that please.  Now what was first public theme that had color variation ... looking back that would be Sitra by Mystica ... what Harzem has done isnt anything new!!

Multicolor themes

Sitra
Mimic
Helios Multi
Fussilet MC
Estrangiz Multi
SMFOne Multicolor
Default Multicolor
Big Super Happy Fun Fun
Yule

want more

[LiroyvH]

Voted No,
I like the default theme the way it is now, and if I want something else, I can add my own theme.

If you would invest your time in a few clicks to install a theme you like instead of complaining all the time then you would have already installed all the multi-color themes by now.


Sincerely,
- Liroy

[Jade Elizabeth]

I havent read any reply, for the record.

I make themes. Do you know how LONG it would take to make a theme with all of those colours?
Let's be realistic here. SO MANY OF THOSE COLOURS ARE UNUSABLE because they would KILL your visitors (and members) eyes. Though it might be funny to watch them click it out of curiosity lol.

Yes, that's right, it would kill them. Lime green as bright as the ones middle left would kill me...

I am making a multicolour type of theme, I have purple done, it took me 5 hours (well, I was using old CSS at first lol). I plan to have the following colours: white, silver, black, blue, green, red, orange, pink and (maybe) yellow. The images are going to take the longest, I have to make separate images for all of the colours. After that I plan to have colour combos
See the purple theme here: http://www.jades-world.com/forums/index.php?theme=7
See my normal default here: http://www.jades-world.com/forums/index.php?theme=8
See my variation of the default here: http://www.jades-world.com/forums/index.php?theme=9

Some colours should be left to the imagination only

[Gary]

Yes, but many mods only install for the default theme and thus the need of a multicolor theme.

A Multi Colour theme will not solve the fact that mods will be incompatible with the core theme. All it'd do is allow you to install across several colours of the SAME theme. But that now is being sorted in SMF 2.0 since you can now attempt install mods on multiple themes in the package manager if you so wish to do so.

I would like to see SMF2.0 more democratic, and in this regard, every member and guest must easily with one single click on the top of any page on the forums open a small window with a color palette like the one I am attaching here (this one is from Word, what everyone knows.... )

This is an admin option. Currently you can opt for people to change themes and such. It has been there since 1.0

Fellow webmasters, please back my request here by voting above. Please feel free to vote against my request, but please do vote, do have your say, do express yourself.

Fellow webmasters, please back my request. Please vote YES and pledge to renew your charter membership if the SMF team adopts our suggestion here.

Dont cram YOUR opinions down peoples throats.

Man! You guys in the smf dev team are really psychological cases to study: even when you have good news, you still love to start with something negative and you love to put it as abruptly as possible....

Since when was anything that Runic posted Negative. You're just not listening to what we're saying. Like others have been saying, SMF is customisable enough to do pretty much anything you can make it do. Including MC style themes, this does not need to be a core feature, nor should it be because for one thing it would cause the core package filesize to explode, and we do still have users who have dial up connections and I dont think they would appreciate us making the filesize any larger than what it is already.

Why is SMF choosing 1 of 3 ship themes as the default?   Because SMF thinks the others look uglier - plain and simple.    SMF will come back saying all 3 themes are great and one (the current default) is better.

For default purposes they were, for their time. The Babylon was the default for 1.0 and the Classic was the default for YaBB SE.

Now that we got that out of the way, the fact that SMF IS picking themes over others.

We're not "picking" themes, we dont just go "oh that theme looks nice, lets make it default in x.x" We design all the themes ourselves. There's a lot of factors to consider when creating a default theme such as language compatibility (hence the template_menu() now using tabs rather than buttons) Right to Left combatility for languages like Arabic, and how easy it is to customise by the expirenced and novice alike. Most themes, including the Dilber MC are built from the default.

Harzem, one single person (and one who is not getting any part of the Charter membership money) did on his own more than 5 shades for his theme.

Is not the SMF team able to match the effort of one single non-paid person and provide a multicolor default theme ?

Several team members have produced MC themes, I myself have one under by belt, Big Super Happy Fun Fun, and I have a second one in development which has more styles and more features that I didnt think about when I was making Big Super Happy Fun Fun.

Voted No,
I like the default theme the way it is now, and if I want something else, I can add my own theme.

If you would invest your time in a few clicks to install a theme you like instead of complaining all the time then you would have already installed all the multi-color themes by now.

Thanks Liroy, this is probably one of the best comments of the lot.

And by the way, I also voted no.

[Deaks]

seems thats the way the public wish it

[青山 素子]

Fourty years after May 1968, we are still fed up of laws and rules and choices being imposed on the young generations. We want more freedom! We want to choose! We want to allow every member and guest on our boards to CHOOSE his or her preferred color. We must not allow ourselves to impose our own choices of colors on them simply because we are offering a service they need.

You know, invoking the whole series of protests and De Gaulle collapse won't get you much in the way of sympathy and even weakens your argument. Heck, I don't think all that many people get the reference (even I had to look it up).

See, the thing is that you cry for "freedom" but want to impose your choices on others, making you no better than those you cry out against.

Here is the thing. SMF comes with a base default theme. It might not be the nicest-looking theme, but it has all the little features SMF can do in it. It supports languages that have different writing directions. There is no mandate saying what you must and must not do. You have the freedom to offer a wide variety of theme options to your site visitors if you choose to do so.

SMF doesn't impose a single theme for the system. You can use different ones if you like. You can create your own if you wish. There is no forcing on any part if you don't like it. This is the freedom you want, and it already is there.

[Jade Elizabeth]

Fourty years after May 1968, we are still fed up of laws and rules and choices being imposed on the young generations. We want more freedom! We want to choose! We want to allow every member and guest on our boards to CHOOSE his or her preferred color. We must not allow ourselves to impose our own choices of colors on them simply because we are offering a service they need.

You know, invoking the whole series of protests and De Gaulle collapse won't get you much in the way of sympathy and even weakens your argument. Heck, I don't think all that many people get the reference (even I had to look it up).

See, the thing is that you cry for "freedom" but want to impose your choices on others, making you no better than those you cry out against.

Here is the thing. SMF comes with a base default theme. It might not be the nicest-looking theme, but it has all the little features SMF can do in it. It supports languages that have different writing directions. There is no mandate saying what you must and must not do. You have the freedom to offer a wide variety of theme options to your site visitors if you choose to do so.

SMF doesn't impose a single theme for the system. You can use different ones if you like. You can create your own if you wish. There is no forcing on any part if you don't like it. This is the freedom you want, and it already is there.

And as for the themes available on this site, that is PURELY the owners decision. Nothing is stopping you from learning, and creating this default theme you dream of, so why not do it so people can have their freedom?