So its been several more days and I have spent quite a bit of my spare time working on this theme conversion.. I can almost say its complete, but not quite yet.

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

My colorChooser system is about 90% done in Firefox and Safari, and about 70% done in Opera and IE. I’m not at all surprised that it’s not working correctly in IE, but the fact that Opera has the same error was a little shocking. Usually Safari and Opera work in parallel when it comes to javascript. Meaning if it works in one, it works in the other and vice versa.. I’ve managed to break that paradigm with this bit of code.. hehe.. It will be interesting to see what the issue is..

At this point choosing a preset or overlay works and colors the page correctly, and choosing an input to edit works. But you can only actually change the colors in Firefox and Safari using the cursors. There is something about doing that in IE and Opera that isn’t working. I’ll get that fixed here shortly I’m sure.

Also whatever change you make isn’t saved yet.. That’s just a matter of storing cookies and what not, I just haven’t done that yet. Also I haven’t made it realize you typed in a color.. I’ll get to it =)

It’s close!! I promise! Once I get the theme working correctly I’ll begin implementing it in WPMU.. Once that’s done I’ll start implementing it in IPB, which I dread.

I have tried to make my colorChooser system versatile enough that you can apply it to any webpage. That was my intent anyway. I hope to eventually apply it to my current rsow.com theme MicroBlue. Doing so will prove that it can be done and then I’ll release it to the wild.

Once I get the colorChooser working though, I will next add to it a way to change not just colors and overlays but also the whole theme. This will take a lot of work and is a ways down the road, but it should be pretty neat once I get there. I have a lot more stuff to do in the mean time though so I’m not holding my breath on that one.

I do need to redo my FFF graphic.. the one that is on the page now is a temporary that was created quickly to give me an idea of what I was trying for.. I like it, but it needs a lot of polish.. the film cannister looks horrible and the https on the urls make them too long.. etc.. I’ll do my best to make it better, I just wished my artistic abilities were anything above the nothing that they are now.. *sigh*

I will also add alpha shadows around the colorChooser box once it’s expanded. I haven’t done that yet either.. It’s interesting, as much work as I have done — and it’s been a lot — I am still not done yet. hehe

Speaking of not done; Another feature I was kicking around was a way for users to create a color set using the colorChooser then submitting them with a name or something to me so that I can easily make them public.. I mean if you create something that looks nice others might like it too.. Not sure how I’ll do that, or if I can. But maybe.. =)

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://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.

I’m stunned that I got botted so soon after putting it up, more over on domains that didn’t exist until yesterday.  BUT likely due to my post of yesterday which told the bots where to go — woops.  A solution was required and fast!

I did some research and found a nice plugin that should solve the problem, and help others at the same time.  The folks over at recaptcha.net are solving this problem in a new and creative way.  Recaptcha is helping solve the problem of imperfect OCR readers and helping to digitize books by sending words that cannot be ready by the computer to the web in the form of captcha’s to be solved by humans.   This is all kinds of clever. 

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known.  The user is then asked to read both words.  if they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one.  the system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

By adding this spam blocker, we are helping the greater community.. I like that.

The amusing thing is BlaenkDenum JUST created this reCaptcha WPMU plug-in a couple of days ago.. lucky for me!