Ok, this is a good spot for me to explain the plan then. Now I haven't worked out everything yet, so please give me feedback on what you think.
Right now I am currently making the site so that it looks for css files in a numbered folder, I will later make it so that you can change the number of the folder, which will change all of the css files of the site.
In each skin folder there will be 1 global css file that is loaded on every page and then a ton of page specific css files that will be loaded especially on that page.
I have given things common names, for example every "panel" or box of information might be named panel. This way you edit the entire site by editing the way it shows a panel. Then the individual pages will be for unique things like how big a row is on a table or something.
It should be rather easy then to create a new skin.
The dilemma I have though is, I don't want to have to constantly turn down skins that users have spent hours and days and possibly months working on. However I also don't want to have 100 skin choices in someones settings panel and a ton of those skins are just confusing and weird looking or possibly even ugly. You might think why not have them? It doesn't do any harm to have more. But it's the same reason we wouldn't want a ton of crappy maps. Even if we do have some good ones, the crappy ones just bring the quality of the site down.
So I want people to be confident that whatever the site supports and offers is quality work. So perhaps we might have official skins and then unofficial skins. Unofficial skins will be skins created by users, we will still require quality though, but it won't be as critical. What would happen is I would install the skin, but in order for a user to use the skin they have to unlock it somehow, or perhaps the skin has an id and downloads, but if multiple people use the skin it doesn't redownload, because it checks the id to see if the skin has already been downloaded. However it doesn't list the skin in their settings options unless they do something extra.
I don't know if I explained that well. However the goal is so when changing to one of these unofficial skins the user has to do something that reinforces the idea that this skins does not belong to DXII and if it doesn't work properly or if something is up, then remove it, it's not ours so we don't take responsibility for any problems or any unattractive things about it. Sort of like the greasemonkey scripts with conquer club. You can add them, and they will make the site better, but the site doesn't take responsibility for their screw ups.
During holidays there will be other official "holiday templates" which every user will automatically be switched to. When it's Christmas time everyone will be looking at a nice Christmas template for a day or two.
Ok, this is a good spot for me to explain the plan then. Now I haven't worked out everything yet, so please give me feedback on what you think.
Right now I am currently making the site so that it looks for css files in a numbered folder, I will later make it so that you can change the number of the folder, which will change all of the css files of the site.
In each skin folder there will be 1 global css file that is loaded on every page and then a ton of page specific css files that will be loaded especially on that page.
I have given things common names, for example every "panel" or box of information might be named panel. This way you edit the entire site by editing the way it shows a panel. Then the individual pages will be for unique things like how big a row is on a table or something.
It should be rather easy then to create a new skin.
The dilemma I have though is, I don't want to have to constantly turn down skins that users have spent hours and days and possibly months working on. However I also don't want to have 100 skin choices in someones settings panel and a ton of those skins are just confusing and weird looking or possibly even ugly. You might think why not have them? It doesn't do any harm to have more. But it's the same reason we wouldn't want a ton of crappy maps. Even if we do have some good ones, the crappy ones just bring the quality of the site down.
So I want people to be confident that whatever the site supports and offers is quality work. So perhaps we might have official skins and then unofficial skins. Unofficial skins will be skins created by users, we will still require quality though, but it won't be as critical. What would happen is I would install the skin, but in order for a user to use the skin they have to unlock it somehow, or perhaps the skin has an id and downloads, but if multiple people use the skin it doesn't redownload, because it checks the id to see if the skin has already been downloaded. However it doesn't list the skin in their settings options unless they do something extra.
I don't know if I explained that well. However the goal is so when changing to one of these unofficial skins the user has to do something that reinforces the idea that this skins does not belong to DXII and if it doesn't work properly or if something is up, then remove it, it's not ours so we don't take responsibility for any problems or any unattractive things about it. Sort of like the greasemonkey scripts with conquer club. You can add them, and they will make the site better, but the site doesn't take responsibility for their screw ups.
During holidays there will be other official "holiday templates" which every user will automatically be switched to. When it's Christmas time everyone will be looking at a nice Christmas template for a day or two.
