[new theme] Zun: beyond the box

Hi,

The previous theme i submitted was a little bit too greedy (bandwidth wise), partly due to the numerous images used. So i rewrote a new one that is much lighter. A quick presentation of the theme:

It is still a fixed-width , 100% height theme. I tried here to maximize the info presented to the user and to make things simple from the user point of view. In particular i tried to focus on contextualization, so both gallery and album are navigable from the image, album and gallery pages.

I also added a litte js candy - but the theme degrades gracefully if js is not enabled.

Last, I kept the template thingie idea from the latest theme with a few improvements, so look-and-feel preservation is guaranteed.

I add to rewrite a lot of zp template functions to fit my needs, so there may be a few bugs that i didn't (or couldn't) see. It is compatible with 1.2.9 and should, for the most part be compatible with 1.2.6 (the search feature might not be backward compatible though).

More info and download here: http://gilles.dodinet.fr/page/theme-info

As a side note, i experimented a weird things with the search feature: if i use next_news in search context, news are not sorted chronologically, but rather by id (and in ascending order). I tracked the problem down to SearchEngine#searchFieldsAndTags : news are indeed sorted by id -- i worked around this by manually sorting the results in descending order, but since the query doesn't return the date field, the sort is still done against the id field - which most often will match the date (but not always, obviously).

Regards

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    New themes are always welcome. You should really let us also know if you remove themes, as our link for zinenaboxpacity now leads to this one..... Actually I best would be if you keep it as it might be a good starting point for others (who knows - even if you don't support it anymore).

    Nice theme although a little "tiny" and "narrow", given today's screens (although good for mobile devices but if there the fancy js stuff works?).

    Regarding the next_news() search issue, by date would actually be fitting, at least it should take the parameters next_news() has. Anyway, please open a ticket. Here this otherwise will get lost for sure.
  • Hello Acrylian,

    The link points to the new theme, indeed. I thought keeping download links for old themes was enough (they're at the bottom of the page). Nonetheless I'll re-add the description page of zinenaboxpacity.

    However I'm not sure i can easily setup demos for old-theme - unless i create another zp installation (perhaps using a dedicated sub-domain?). I'll think about it and will keep you posted - not in the coming days though.

    I will open a ticket regarding next_news in search context asap [ edit- here's the ticket link: http://www.zenphoto.org/trac/ticket/1515 ]

    The following is a little off-topic (just because you seem to care a lot about mobile devices :)

    The more i think about it, the more i think this mobile devices issue is a non issue, as software should be self-adaptive. In this particular case, it might be zp responsibility to present the correct theme to the user (through device-targeted theme configuration, of course). Indeed i strongly believe that the "one-size-fits-all" items really fit none.

    That said, i did my research and it seems that mini-opera, for instance, apparently even in its 5th version, doesn't really support client-side js. Here's a pretty old document (concerning mini 4): http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/javascript-support-in-opera-mini-4/

    There should be no problem however with terminals running safari (iphone, ipad, etc.): as a matter of fact we got a complex Ext app (so entirely js driven) that can run smoothly on iphone.

    Terminals running mobile firefox should also be safe (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile), although i don't know what is the status of the project.

    Regards
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Thanks for the ticket.

    Regarding the theme: Of course it is your choice if you keep a page for the theme. It's just that we link to that page that now presents a new theme. That would probably be confusing. It's also just a little for our convenience...;-)

    Re. Mobile device:
    I agree in the "one-size-fits-all" in general. Although there are designs that naturally can't work with all screen sizes or at least not as conveniently. A matter of space. I personally do not even have a mobile device actually and I know virtually no one who really uses mobile internet. But that may change of course.

    Regarding zenphote delivering hte right theme. That is actually already possible or wil become with 1.3 using a filter, you just have to do it (there was a thread about that recently somewhere, don't remember).
  • maxslug Member
    Great theme! I was just looking into doing what you did : using AJAX to change pictures and not using image.php unless you really have to.
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    @gdodinet: I have made an entry for this one on the themes sections and changed the links of the others.
  • Thanks Acrylian,

    In the mean time, I've also put the old description page online : http://gilles.dodinet.fr/page/zinenabox. I'll also see if i can setup a zp installation theme demo (on the fly theme switching), no promise though.

    maxslug, i'll answer you in the other topic ("fluid theme").
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Thanks. I think, just a page we can directly link to is enough (for Grey simplicity we would need a page as well btw).
  • Will do it :)
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Thanks..;-) I took a quick look at your theme. Since Zenphoto 1.3 will be labeled php 5 only (although without being really PHP 5 but we only test on that) you might want to add that your theme is PHP 5+ maybe.
  • Hi Acrylian,

    Here's the link to a page describing "grey simplicity" : http://gilles.dodinet.fr/pages/grey-simplicity

    I also saw that you described the "zun" as javascript-heavy; I think this is not the case. Granted, my first instinct was to craft a single page site with dynamic content loading. However i dropped that idea when i looked into enabling history support : this implied polluting the adress bar with duplicated information and this was not visually appealing to me. Nonetheless i didn't drop the loading mechanism (the loadPage method) as i thought it could prove useful - even if not for me, nor immediately.

    Regards
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Ok, sorry, I didn't mean it in a bad way actually. A theme that loads content dynamically ifor me is "quite js heavy". Probably I am a little old school ...;-)

    Update: I have changed the description on the theme entry:
    http://www.zenphoto.org/zp/theme/zun-beyond-the-box/zun-beyond-the-box-index.jpg.php

    Update 2: Thanks for the Grey simplicity page. I have updated its entry as well.
  • Thanks Acrylian. By the way, it was not a complaint, merely a terminology disagreement, i guess :)
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    I figured that..;-)
  • marcov Member
    Very nice theme! The download link for the zune: beyond the box theme gives a 404 error.
  • Hello Marco,

    Thanks. I've just updated the link (i forgot to change it when i migrated the site to ovh). It should be ok now.
  • Links now work. Nice theme, can't wait to see the next one.
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