The Theming update is now live! This update includes changes to the www.mmoguildsites.com website, an entirely re-written Theme Editor with lots of new features, and new layout changes to nearly every page of your guild site.
CHANGES TO THEME EDITORThe theme editor has been completely re-written and offers many new features and a much improved UI.
*note: The Theme Editor uses a lot of javascript, and the more modern web browser you can use the better experience you will have with it. We recommend Mozilla Firefox.Fast AJAX UIThe theme editors UI has been made very modern, allowing you to work on a preview view similar to your site and have nearly all actions happen instantly with no page refresh. Selecting colors, borders, fonts and even adding and positioning images with the theme editor happen without having to refresh the page, allowing you to quickly create and edit themes.
Workflow ImprovementsYou can now apply your theme you are working on from the theme editor directly to your site, rather then having to first save it as before.
New Themable ElementsSeveral new elements can be themed with the new theme editor, which are:
Pollbars, Table Headers, Table Highlights (two available), Notification Box, Popup Box and Header, Menu Links and Other Text.
To keep the theme editor compatible with older themes and existing site themes, we selected existing colors from your themes to populate the new elements, which seems to have worked out well. If you were using one of Severed Pinkies themes, she is working to have them updating by the end of today to take advantage of the new theme elements. You can reload her themes into the theme editor and then recustomize them to enable some of the new colors for your site.
Most of the elements are pretty straight-forward, but the Other Text and Table Highlights may be a little less obvious. We added the Other Text element as a way to have two text colors on the site, it is meant as a shaded color to compliment your regular text color, and is mostly used for labels. The Table Highlights are also meant to compliment your existing table colors, and are used to highlight things such as special dates on the calendar.
Custom CSSYou can now include your own CSS with your theme.
* if you give the new theme editor a try we would love to hear your feedback and experience with it, to help us to improve it and make it even better in the future.CHANGES TO www.mmoguildsites.com Themes ListThe themes list received some polish and has several new features. Themes now are taggable, and a tag cloud is shown in the right sidebar. Searching and sorting has been made simpler, and the UI has been cleaned up.
Working with ThemesYou may now edit themes you own. And, for themes which you load into the theme editor, you have the option to save them as a new theme, or save over your old one, allowing you to more easily update your themes.
Themes AccessibilitySetting who is allowed to access your theme has been simplified and made easier; there is now checkboxes which you can check to allow anyone (public) or specific guilds to have access to your themes. If none of the checkboxes are checked, the theme will then be private and only accessible by you.
Members/GuildsThe Members and Guilds sections of MMO Guildsites received a bit of polish to match the new UI for the themes list page
Login MenuThe login menu at the top of MMO Guildsites has received some polish and now includes more information about you when you are logged in, including your avatar, some stats about you, and some useful links.
CHANGES TO GUILD SITESThe UI for nearly all of the pages and blocks on the guild sites have been updated to take advantage of the new elements available in the theme editor.
Member ProfilesThe member profiles section has been organized into a tabbed layout now and should have a much more standardized feel for each sub-page of the profile.
PollsThe polls page has received some extra polish. Assigning polls to the sideblock has been made easier and clearer now; when the poll side block is added to your site but a poll is not set to it, it will still be visible; and assigning a poll to the side block will now update the side block without having to refresh the page, making it less confusing to use.
Private MessagesThe Private Messaging section was reorganized to make better use of horizontal space, and, more importantly, you will now see an excellent orc icon when you receive system messages from MMO Guildsites! =)
Members ListThe members list page now has members grouped by Rank, and are organized by Rank and then Alphabetically, allowing you to more easily find members within your guild.
AvatarsAvatars are now saved in two sizes, 96x96 and 50x50, which allows us to show more compact layouts when a lot of information is necessary, such as on the members list page.
Searching and PaginationThe Searching and Pagination features on the site have been standardized across all the pages now, and offer more information such as how many total records and which sub-set of records you are viewing, as well as any search terms you may be filtering by.
WHATS NEXT?This was a very long and time consuming update, as it involved basically re-writing the UI for every part of the site. Now that it is complete we plan to get back to shorter and quicker updates.
The next update, which we plan to have finished in 7 to 14 days, we will be adding a Videos section to the site; where you can add videos, categorize them and comment on them. This update will also include some final fantasy XI blocks which were suggested by one of our members.
The following update, we will be adding the Notifications we had mentioned in the first theme preview. We wanted to include them with this update, but as it was taking so long, we decided it would be best to break them out into their own update to prevent and further delays.
Great work! :D
However, there is one slight issue I'm having with our site.
None of the background wallpaper for any of the custom themes I have made for my guild work, and there is not an option to change background wallpaper features (unless I'm completely looking in the wrong place, but I've been all over it and still can't find a clickable spot, or drop down for it.) Any help or direct location of the theming options for the background wallpaper would be much appreciated!
Thank you and great job once again! :)
I am, however, unable to get the wallpaper to apply correctly to my site. It shows up in the Theme Editor properly, but after application to my site it fails to show up.
It has now been fixed and background images for the wallpaper should be showing up.
Please put those buttons back.
I will make a change for that section to add the mark all posts read to the top actions part when viewing unread posts; the change should be pushed live tomorrow. =)
While playing around, I have run into one very minor issue that (if possible) I would like to see changed in a future update to the Theme Editor. In the CSS we have .notice_text and .other_text. I love being able to edit the .other_text, but I was wondering if we could get an option to change the Named Item text or just a general third text option?
Using the .notice_text color for raid loot kind of eliminates the punch of the notice text color. It would be nice for raid loot (named_item) to either take on the actual item color OR for us to specify what color we want that item to be other than the .notice_text color.
Just wanted to toss that suggestion out there. ;)
Thanks again for all your hard work!
-Kiz
Thanks for your feedback and comments on the Theme Editor =)
We are planning to add an admin section specifically for Items, which will allow you to customize the colors shown for items..we unfortunately cannot use the default colors that may be provided from a game, say for example WoW, since we allow the sites to be themed and then a site with a white background would find normal items invisible (white on white). So to get around this we will be adding an admin section in a future update to allow you to specify item colors =)