You can see my progress here:

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

I’ve run into some interesting javascript foibles that I have had to deal with and have also taken this opportunity to start on my own javascript toolbox.

Every artist has his favorite paintbrush or pens, every carpenter his favorite hammer, and every plumber his favorite ass crack pants.. I’m using this project to develop my own javascript toolkits. For now they are largely unfinished and designed to be used for .. well this project.. but it is a start..

With regards to the theme, I’m working specifically on getting the colorchooser to work. Right now it doesn’t choose colors, and I only got the slider/picker cursors to work today. But only on clicks, you can’t drag them yet.

I’m hoping to have it work better than the Chromatophore stuff, and so far the one thing that works better (in my opinion) is the way the chooser slides out. Firstly from a purely javascript profiling stand point I win hands down;

The Chromatophore theme makes 454 javascript calls to “slide” their colorchooser down, where as my version only makes 88 calls.. 454 man! I have no idea what they are doing of course because they obfuscate their code and I don’t feel like eval’ing it out and running tidy to figure it out..

My color chooser will also be fixed once down so you can scroll around the page and have the color chooser open to see how your changes work live on the page, instead of having a mini-preview — right now this isn’t the case but it will be.

I’m still very excited about this and working on it.. but this is taking time.

To that end I have decided to convert (or redesign) the Chromatophore Joomla theme into a combined wordpress / invision power board theme. I decided to go with this look because I very much appreciate what the folks over at RocketTheme did with the Chromatophore theme. To be honest if I were using Joomla I’d buy it, but since I’m not I must create my own.

Instead of just cutting and pasting their html, js, css, and images into an already created wordpress template I have decided to recreate the theme from what I see alone. Without looking at their source — at all.  (So far I’ve only peaked a couple times)

It’s been a challenge to be honest. One that I am up to for sure as my webdesign-foo is strong, but they have done some pretty neat kungfu hackery here that I really like. Not sure who the lead ninja was on this one, but he did a very good job. (Why do I keep referencing martial arts?) You can test my progress here;

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

As you can see I’m a long way off yet, but its coming along nicely. I have to get all the various bits working across the board and then try to apply it to the template system in wordpress .. then try to apply it to the even more convoluted template system in IPB. I have to admit the later one is gonna suck. I appreciate what the IPB folks were trying to do with template designs but they went WAY over board with cutting things up and making one’s life a living hell.

Also, most likely for the forum itself the left column of stuff will either have some form of minimize toggle or it will simple be hidden via css, I havent decided yet. I don’t want to crowd the forum. It’s had a full width layout for years now and shrinking it might annoy folks.

I really like how you can control all colors and what not in the Chromatophore theme and the same functionality will eventually exist in my theme.

It makes me think that there might be a market for folks who do nothing but convert themes from joomla to wordpress or to IPB.. Not a job I’m volunteering for as this is severly cutting into my game time.. but still a market all the same.