On 07/03/2014 02:17 AM, Gaurav Saini wrote:
2.) The fauxcoly theme uses YUI (Yahoo User Interface) stored in
webapp/roller-ui/yui, but the YUI is from 2009. I'd like to have it
replaced with the latest release YUI. The YUI we ship with Roller is
not just for fauxcoly, but for any YUI-based custom theme a user may
wish to create (by keeping it in roller-ui/yui a new theme creator
doesn't have to bother importing all the YUI files with his theme.)
Also, if the theme can be tweaked a bit to be responsive while using
YUI still that would be good.
What I think is two option for this, we can replace YUI with bootstrap
themes (http://bootswatch.com/) and this is make it responsive. Also
with this we can upgrade the back-end UI also through which it will be
easier to create blogs from any screens (mobiles and tabs on the go).
Another option is upgrading to YUI 2 to YUI 3, but YUI 3 might not
provide much features which bootstrap provides, although from docs it
seems it has responsiveness support.
My Idea is to go with bootstrap as its easier to upgrade it and active
development is going at hight pace and will enhance the UI very much.
If YUI is not part of your present research interests, no problem, leave
#2 alone then -- I'll look into this one. I haven't looked at YUI much
but if it's becoming obsolete, we can switch it to another up-and-coming
competitor to Bootstrap. But I think it would be good for Roller to
support a 2nd UI CSS & JavaScript library, even if it is not as good or
as popular as Bootstrap, if only to demonstrate that Roller has a
flexible architecture and hence isn't hardcoded to a specific UI
technology.
In earlier versions of Roller (for example JRoller hosted by DZone), new
bloggers would get a choice of maybe 15 themes and would just choose
whichever one they felt looks best. I'm trying to move to fewer but
more functional themes -- i.e., (1) we have at least one
jquery/bootstrap theme , (2) a YUI (or another technology) theme, (3)
(apparently) a theme that can flip between mobile and standard (basic
theme), (4) we have a front-page theme (which is just an accumulator of
other blogs, looks like this one: http://www.jroller.com/), (5) a
non-responsive theme for blogging software code (basic theme will do,
but I like the Rolling theme I use on my blog), and (6) (future) a
planet theme. Each theme would give users a starting point based on
their desires that they can subsequently customize as they wish.
4.) Both the gaurav and fauxcoly themes duplicate an icons folder
having all the social media bitmaps for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
etc. I'd like to see those icons stored in one place, maybe
roller-ui/icons or /socialmedia or whatever, so themes can reference
those icons without needing to duplicate them into their themes.
+1. Another Idea is to add a share link with each blog similar to
this. (http://awesomescreenshot.com/021333r131). I think we can use
these share buttons, we can check other apache projects for any
licence issue if it have.
All I care about here is just that the icons are centralized so the user
doesn't have to import them with a new theme. Share links are already
available via 3rd party tools (http://www.addthis.com/)--we can make our
own, but it needs to look reasonably comparable in quality to the 3rd
party alternatives; if it's not competitive it's not worth reinventing
the wheel. Also, I haven't confirmed but would like to make sure that
Roller supports the well respected Disqus comment management system that
your blog uses. We must always avoid proprietary, LGPL, or GPL
licenses. Most others (BSD, MIT, Apache of course) are fine.
5.) Shelan, another contributor around 2010 created a mobile weblog
view for a blog, as you can see in the upper-right corner here:
http://www.nailedtothex.org/roller/kyle/entry/nested-list-element-issue-of1
. The mobile theme doesn't seem to work right today (that blog entry
at that link shows the problems with it, the blogger had to make
changes basically making it a standard blog anyway, and even with
those changes I saw further errors with it.) What Shelan did was
very nice circa 2010 (before Bootstrap existed) but might be frowned
upon today, I think one is expected to use a responsive theme today
when you want to support all types of devices, rather than have
(antiquated?) "click here for mobile" and "click here for standard"
buttons. Unsure, but we may wish to pull this out of the basic theme
once fauxcoly and gaurav are better established.
+1. Rather than different mobile and standard buttons we can have that
same theme work on mobile, tablets and desktops. I think this might
also clean up a bit code in java and front-end themes as we do not
have to make specific templates for mobiles.
Actually, reading Greg's email, apparently the theme will detect whether
one is reading via smart phone or laptop, and switch to that theme
directly. I guess that is useful functionality for Roller to support,
even if there are problems with the current mobile theme that uses
that. I.e., if we choose to retire the mobile theme from the basic
template, it would be good for Roller to still have that functionality
available for users who would want that, e.g., just mention it in our
User's guide. (I'll be sending another email on this soon.)
Keep in mind, not everything needs to be responsive today. My blog for
example, almost everything I blog is Java code segments meant for
developers sitting at their laptops who got to my blog by googling about
a Java topic I wrote about -- for me I need wide columns that will fit
Java code, I'm not trying to support smart phone readers. Among Apache
projects, CXF and Camel don't bother with responsive themes because
their readers are pure Java developers working at their workstations
with large displays (also, they have a ton of detail they need to give.)
6.) Our website is old-fashioned, perhaps about 50% of Apache
websites are now using Bootstrap and I'd like Roller to be one of
them. The stuff that is on the Roller Wiki would remain there, so
that doesn't need converting, just the several relatively small pages
making up roller.apache.org.
Exicted to take this up :) We can definately use bootstrap on roller
website. Just want to know in which framework the current website is
in and have to check how easy to customize it.
This will require a little bit of research. We use the "Apache CMS"
explained pretty well here:
http://roller.apache.org/getinvolved/edit_website.html. Before you try
anything with bootstrap, I'd like to confirm the current process works
for you--once you become committer, add yourself to our people page and
publish it on the website.
If we use bootstrap, I'm unsure but it may be an svn commit
automatically updates the website instead of the "publish" button you
first have to hit on the above link. The bootstrap sites hosted by
Apache seem to be of two types: some are vanilla bootstrap committed
manually (allows you to use the latest-and-greatest I guess), most seem
to use the Maven Fluido Plugin
(http://maven.apache.org/skins/maven-fluido-skin/) though and somehow
incorporate website updates using Maven commands. We have an Apache
Infrastructure (in...@apache.org) mailing list you can ask whatever
technical questions you have (that we don't know. :)
If you could bring in Bootstrap while keeping our current publish-button
system, that would be great. Failing that, some way we can look at our
changes locally and confirm they look good before publishing to the
internet. Also, to update our edit_website page describing the new
process so others will know what to do.
7.) We eventually should have a sample theme (probably non-responsive
as this is a portal-type page) showing how to display Roller's Planet
functionality (it is very crude here:
http://rollerweblogger.org/project/page/planet, the CSS isn't
working). I haven't looked at this at all, and am unsure how well
the backend still supports it.
I am bit unclear about the planet concept. Can you please tell me a
bit what exactly it does.
The planet concept is meant to create a light dashboard to take care of
mild accumulation needs (mailing list updates, list of bloggers you're
subscribed to, changes to Wiki pages) so you don't have to immediately
move to fuller CMS solutions unless you really need something more
advanced (maybe Jetspeed or Lenya or Jackrabbit or whatever.) We're
blogging software, there's other Apache projects handling other types of
content management systems we're not here to duplicate. This is a
later-off thing, perhaps, after we get the main blog themes working.
If any of this sounds interesting to you (or any other Roller
committer), just let us know so we're not duplicating effort and feel
free to jump into it!
Regards,
Glen
Just let me know priority wise which task to take first, then we can
move around all and complete it.
My suggestions: ROL-2022 (good starter practice working with SVN at
Apache), ROL-2020, ROL-2023. Then your choice of either working with
the YUI stuff (ROL-2019, ROL-2021) or updating the website w/Bootstrap
(ROL-2024). Just claim one at a time though on JIRA (others are welcome
to grab others, I may take one or two myself), complete it before
grabbing another. But we have to wait of course until Dave gets you
write access.
Regards,
Glen
