OSDev.org

Over the past few months (I think it was about December when I started) I've been working on a new theme for my site. It's long, repetitive, and tedious, and I'm starting to lose motivation, especially when I think about everything that still needs to be done. On top of all of that, since I've been working on the theme for so long, I've had certain parts of the style change from page to page (i.e. on one page the items are outset, while on another the items are inset) and I really dread trying to go through and find all of these inconsistencies to fix them. Finally, since I'm basically reworking the existing theme, the coding isn't as efficient as it could be, and while I want to go through and fix that, I also don't. Oh, and the layout is mostly controlled by tables, which I've heard is a no-no with web design.

On the bright side, everything that I've made myself (not simply patched over with my own color style) looks good in every browser I've used, and it validates as proper XHTML 1.0 Transitional (at least, the biggest part of it does. The script I use for the downloads section is not all that great).

I just need to figure out how to motivate myself to finish it.

From all my experience in the internet, I would say that the simpler the better.
Don't focus on looks if it detracts from usability.
As for motivational purposes, I can't really help you. You have to find a way to motivate yourself or it won't be worth anything to you when the project is done. Just right now I decided on a second thing I could do to help the open source community and OSDev. The first is a surprise that I won't reveal until I have hosting secured. The second is a tool to manipulate disk images and copy/remove/list/etc files without mounting the image. (I may also include the ability to create and partition disk images with various file systems as well, but that's all in good time) My motivation for it is that it's one of the tedious things I had to do when I was actively working on my own OS. As well, the only implementation of something similar is too limited and badly written to be very good piece of software.

I'd suggest using some PHP and some CSS to get all the page elements looking the same. CSS allows you to specify how they look, seperate from the semantics of the page. PHP allows you automate the creation of page elements. If you don't already know either of those, go learn. Learning might even provide some motivation to finish your website!

JackScott wrote:I'd suggest using some PHP and some CSS to get all the page elements looking the same. CSS allows you to specify how they look, seperate from the semantics of the page. PHP allows you automate the creation of page elements. If you don't already know either of those, go learn. Learning might even provide some motivation to finish your website!

idk.. I had my PHP kick a few years ago where I spent a lot of time with it. Since then, I still know enough to use it, but hate the language. Any "good" idea I have that must go over the web I just about contemplate making a CGI rather than using PHP, plainly because PHP bores me to death... I'm not even sure why, it's just a boring language to me $POST and stuff.. idk just tedious to work with the langugae..

I'm using MyBB (and have made a couple of PHP plugins for it) which uses CSS and template pages. The actual colors and images are consistent, it's just minor things like how I decide to separate threads vs how I separate PMs. They use similar, but not the same, templates, so it's easy to make a minor change between the two, like it better, but forget to go back and change the rest of the site to match.

Oh, did I mention I still haven't decided on the CMS for the main website? I'm not looking forward to reimplementing my theme in a third template/theme system (MyBB , RW::Download, and whatever CMS).

I've decided that I'm going to go down the template list and do each one individually. That way it's easy for me to see how many more templates I have to rework, and therefore I may be able to motivate myself better (only X more template categories to go!).

Are there any suggestions for a CMS that doesn't basically resolve down to a blogging system? I just want the www subdomain to have information. The forums subdomain will contain any day-to-day news I feel like posting, and the downloads subdomain will have, well, downloads.

Firestryke31 wrote:I'm using MyBB (and have made a couple of PHP plugins for it) which uses CSS and template pages. The actual colors and images are consistent, it's just minor things like how I decide to separate threads vs how I separate PMs. They use similar, but not the same, templates, so it's easy to make a minor change between the two, like it better, but forget to go back and change the rest of the site to match.

Oh, did I mention I still haven't decided on the CMS for the main website? I'm not looking forward to reimplementing my theme in a third template/theme system (MyBB , RW::Download, and whatever CMS).

I've decided that I'm going to go down the template list and do each one individually. That way it's easy for me to see how many more templates I have to rework, and therefore I may be able to motivate myself better (only X more template categories to go!).

Are there any suggestions for a CMS that doesn't basically resolve down to a blogging system? I just want the www subdomain to have information. The forums subdomain will contain any day-to-day news I feel like posting, and the downloads subdomain will have, well, downloads.

Drupal?

I'll look into it. How easy is it to create a theme that may or may not follow their "standard" layout? Also, how fast is it? I tried Joomla on my "test server" (read: home laptop) and it was rather slow compared to MyBB and RW:Download.

Knowing the features I want I might consider writing my own basic CMS system, but then I'd have to deal with security and whatnot.

I've been basically rewriting my theme to be far more CSS-based than it previously was, as well as more optomized, and managed to get my index page shrunk by 299 bytes. Oh well, that's 299 fewer bytes per request I won't be needing to transmit. Once I remove indentation (it's all messed up anyway due to different indentation levels in different templates) I can't even begin to guess how many more bytes I'll save...

Firestryke31 wrote:I'll look into it. How easy is it to create a theme that may or may not follow their "standard" layout? Also, how fast is it? I tried Joomla on my "test server" (read: home laptop) and it was rather slow compared to MyBB and RW:Download.

Knowing the features I want I might consider writing my own basic CMS system, but then I'd have to deal with security and whatnot.

I've been basically rewriting my theme to be far more CSS-based than it previously was, as well as more optomized, and managed to get my index page shrunk by 299 bytes. Oh well, that's 299 fewer bytes per request I won't be needing to transmit. Once I remove indentation (it's all messed up anyway due to different indentation levels in different templates) I can't even begin to guess how many more bytes I'll save...

I've been asked to set up a couple of businesses with Drupal before, so it can't be that bad. They're easily skinnable.

I think I'll look into that as soon as I finish the themes for the software I already have.

One last question, can you save a theme so that you can move it from one computer to another? That would make development so much easier since I could just work on it at my home computer and dump everything on my server once it's done (a la big reveal of new website layout).

Firestryke31 wrote:I think I'll look into that as soon as I finish the themes for the software I already have.

One last question, can you save a theme so that you can move it from one computer to another? That would make development so much easier since I could just work on it at my home computer and dump everything on my server once it's done (a la big reveal of new website layout).

I think so...drupal is pretty flexible.