What's new in Mys v1.3.4: Theme/CSS Editor

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I've been busy with research paper and exams over the past month, but now everything is over so I believe it's about time to give users a preview of what new features will be in Mys v1.3.4. The very first new feature is not that new though, it is a theme editor. Mysidia's old theme editor was flawed to begin with, and this new one will be a significant improvement over the old version.

To access theme editor, all you have to do is to go to AdminCP and click on one of the four available items inside the new sidebar menu called 'Themes'. Below is the screenshot for creating a new theme:

97i4gk.jpg


As you can see, the new theme editor allows you and your stylers to create new themes by specifying the header and body html, and the style css completely from scratch. You still need to specify the theme name and theme folder, the latter is especially important since it determines the routes/paths to your template files. With this, it will be rather convenient to create/edit themes for your site.

If you have made your templates/stylesheet beforehand, or if you are installing a third party theme, all you have to do is to select a checkbox to mark the action as 'install' rather than 'create'. This way the existing themes will be imported and added to your database without affecting the original template files. The naming convention can be a bit tricky here, but it is not difficult to figure out. The one constraint here is that you cannot upload images/banners yet, which will be resolved in Mys v1.4.0.

Once created, the style will be readily available for your users to select through style switcher, assuming you have not disabled this feature for your site. Here's a screenshot of the new theme(Brighter) in action:

2jcpig.jpg



You can also manage your existing themes through the theme manager/editor page:

e9awra.jpg


As you have seen, the Brighter theme has been successfully added to database and you can edit its templates and css easily. You may update or delete a theme as you wish, but it can be a problem to delete themes that your members commonly use.

The new theme editor also allows you to specify additional css for your site. The additional css files are all stored inside the folder /css. They can either be utility css(such as menu and tabs), or page css for a specific controller/page of your site. Additional css can either be loaded explicitly in your template file(the dropdown menu css is a very good example) or implicitly loaded in a specific page/class. Take a look at the screenshot below to see what the additional css editor looks like(Do not ask me why the textarea for dropdown menu css looks weird, I have absolutely no idea lol):

vyp3d.jpg



It is not recommended to mess with utility css, but page css are very easy to manipulate. If you name your additional css file as account.css, myadopts.css or anything that is related to a specific page, it will be recognized as a page css. The page css is automatically loaded on the particular page to override the main css, but it will not be loaded on any other pages. For instance, if you have an additional css called account.css, it will take effect for your account.php page. It is rather easy to create an additional css, which is demonstrated by the screenshot below:
33eon7p.jpg


So this concludes my brief introduction of Mysidia v1.3.4's new theme editor. It is still not perfect, and several further improvement will be carried out in Mys v1.4.0 to make a more professional theme manager. Nonetheless, I hope it will help a few of you who have struggled with styling/templating in Mys v1.3.x previously. Please lemme know if you have any ideas/suggestions to improve the theme editor. I am not an artist myself, so Id always love to listen to advices from artists when it comes to themes/styles.

Hall of Famer
 
Wow, the theme editor looks very nice, HoF! I don't have trouble with styling much anymore, but I'm sure a lot of users who are only just learning css/html will really appreciate...and honestly it'll make my life easier XD
 

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