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Better group formatting options

Started by Arantor, September 03, 2013, 07:13:03 PM

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Arantor

Two things.

Firstly, it's always, always bugged me that the online list uses group's colours but the main listing doesn't. It should either be one or the other, not a half-way house.

If we accept the notion of having the group colours everywhere - and it's usually not as bad it as it sounds like it might be! - we start to wonder about other things like bold and italics.

The usual argument still stands - the online list already uses bold and italics, but that's no biggie, reply them with icons to indicate the state rather than using formatting. Then you're free to add whatever formatting you like. It's not a huge job but it's irritating enough.

It might look like so.

Irisado

I like colours, so I'd have no issue with adding them more widely.  The fact that I like it probably means that Emanuele will hate it though, just to give you advanced warning :D!

That said, I don't think that it's a major problem to leave things as they are.
Soñando con una playa donde brilla el sol, un arco iris ilumina el cielo, y el mar espejea iridescentemente

kat

It's something that's always made me scratch my head, too.

It kinda shows a lack of consistency.

But... I have a small caveat, which may, or may not, be bollox.

If the colours are set, like that, could there be the possibility that such colours could render some names invisible, when using some custom themes?

Burke ♞ Knight

Colors are set anyway, just in the info-center online section, so themes are already a bit of a problem there.

What Arantor is meaning, is use the colors everywhere, not just there.

Also, his ideas on extra formatting are great. :)

kat

Yeah, I realised with the "Everywhere" thing. I guess custom themes would need to take such things into consideration.

Mine you, changing the group colours isn't, exactly, quantum theory, is it? ;)

Burke ♞ Knight

Quote from: K@ on September 04, 2013, 04:57:51 PM
Mine you, changing the group colours isn't, exactly, quantum theory, is it? ;)

It can be with some of the themes :P


Antechinus

The problem comes when you have multiple theme options on the one site (either seperate theme or variants of one theme). That's when coloured text, whatever it is used for, can be really problematic. My 2c is that generally it's better to avoid coloured text that is not controlled by the theme's CSS.

IF you really want to enable group colours everywhere, then to make it easy to use you should give all those elements a class accrding to membergroup, and allow the theme to assign CSS that will be legible on the relevant background.

Arantor

That's the thing, Ant, that's actually how I did it by default.

I had this stuff building coloured groups as classes, e.g. defining a.group1 or a.group2 or whatever and the top level CSS would contain that - and if a later declaration (i.e. a theme itself) wanted to override specifics, that's fine.

I'm not saying that admins have to use it but it should really be an option, IMHO. And doing it as classes means themes can override should they want to regardless of what the admin wants. End of the day it's not entirely up to the themer as to how it looks on a given site.

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