Home› Themes

Upgrading Thinkdreams...? Or upgrading themes in general?

spidersilk Member
in Themes
Has anyone ever tried to upgrade a site using the Thinkdreams theme? I know it doesn't work with the current version of ZenPhoto, and the creator doesn't appear to be updating it, but has anyone else tried? If so, did you have any luck?

I set up a gallery for a client a while back using a somewhat customized version of that theme, and now the site is pretty much stuck at the version of ZP it was created with (1.1.3) because I can't upgrade it without horribly breaking the theme. Meanwhile, the client keeps breaking the site by putting in photo and album descriptions that include quotes, which that version of ZP doesn't escape properly, so it blows the layout apart (and yes, I have tried just asking him not to do this - got nowhere).

But I really don't want to leave it like that, because the whole not-escaping-quotes thing is a potential security risk (though not as major as it might be on other sites - this one doesn't allow visitors to create or edit anything, or even leave comments, so no one without access to the admin panel could exploit the vulnerability, as far as I can see) as well as a general nuisance.

I checked out the theming tutorial in hopes that it might have some info on upgrading themes, but it doesn't - it seems to assume you're starting from scratch. It would be great to be able to find some kind of list of what has changed in the structure of themes between different versions, like the Drupal handbook has, but I haven't been able to find anything like that.

So if anyone has either any specific experience upgrading Thinkdreams or a variant thereof, or knows of any kind of resource on how to upgrade ZP themes in general, I would very much appreciate any advice...

Or failing that, would upgrading the site at least to the last version of ZP 1.1 help any? I'm assuming it was with ZP 1.2 that the theme structure changed, correct?

Comments

  • sbillard Member
    It is pretty hard to remember back to the 1.1.3 days. But generally speaking, there are two areas of problem with old themes. The first is with comment handling and the second is with functions that have been dropped.

    It is probably best to target the 1.2.6 release as it has simplified comment handling tremendously--there now is a plugin that you can use to replace all comment handling code.

    I have done a quick scan of the Thinkdreams theme. Here are my observations:

    1. It has its own EXIF handling. That should be removed as Zenphoto now incorporates EXIF/IPTC data extraction automatically. Use the built in function to show the data and the admin interface to select what data gets shown.

    2. Similarly for its random image functons. Random image generation is incorporated in Zenphoto. (See the Effervescence+ theme for an example of its use.)

    3. There also is a slideshow plugin in the current versions so slideshow handling is not needed.

    Changes to Zenphoto have been cumulative, so without actually checking the change logs I could not say if the latest version of 1.1 would be any better from the stantpoint of running the Thinkdreams theme. But I can say from the standpoint of robustness and security it would probably not be worth any effort to move to that level.

    All in all it does not appear it would be too hard to update the Thinkdreams theme to be compatible with the Zenphoto 1.2.6. You can start with the current nightly builds. We are already at development freeze, so only bug fixes will be made between now and the relase August first.
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    To add: The general structure of themes has not really changed, the base is still index.php, album.php and image.php as told on the theming tutorial. The problem is that you have quite a lot freedom in what you can do with a theme. It is not limited to this standard structure at all if you know how to do it. You can even add pages (see custom pages or the Zenpage plugin) or skip some. As sbillard mentioned the thinkdreams one does do custom extra stuff as some other themes also do.
  • spidersilk Member
    Hmmm, OK, that doesn't sound too bad. The site in question actually doesn't use EXIF info or allow comments, so I wouldn't have to deal with those parts at all, other than maybe just removing them. Maybe this will be easier than I thought...

    Thanks!
  • Unknown
    Spidersilk, have you made any progress? I love the Thinkdreams theme and would love to use it...
Sign In or Register to comment.