Hello Glen,
I like the idea of support a 2nd UI library in Roller. Foundation is
another which we can have in roller (http://foundation.zurb.com/). There
are also a lot of people using these library. I can build another Roller
Theme in future using foundation, so that way we will be having
Bootstrap, YUI and foundation themes.
Also, as you mentioned about 6 theme types, that also seems great as
this way user will have a lot of choices to choose from.
I am now taking up ROL-2022 now and waiting for my credentials so I can
have a go with SVN. I have gone with the other JIRA you mentioned. I can
easily grab them as I will be familiar to the SVN.
Thanks
Gaurav
On Friday 04 July 2014 06:30 AM, Glen Mazza wrote:
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
--
Regards,
Gaurav Saini
Developer and Internet Marketing
