Hello module devs,

I love you I really truly do cause without you our sites will be umm html sites where we'd have to add everything by hand but there's few things you can't seem to grasp.

Why oh why you use classes and id's from the core CSS, please stop being lazy and create your own cause the core ones simply suck and it doesn't give a consistent look to our sites, it gives a tabled dull sort of xls feel.

Don't be secretive and share with designers, not community, your ideas of the module so you can get pertinent input about what's really going on today design wise...not too many people otherwise you'll get dizzy cause of the flow of ideas

Stop looking at your predecessors for any reason other than seeing where they failed, don't copy / paste templates and be imaginative

Stop using icons that symbolise and mimic folder icons in windows that's not retro is not geeky and it stopped being cool about 10years ago.

Stop adding features just for the sake of having a full page of features, think small and develop further ones based on feedback on current releases.

On the same note, I rather have a module with +3 brilliant features which is released every few other months then to wait for a +100 features module to be completed in over 1 year...you risk being out of trend before a final version.

Don't reinvent the wheel as its daunting and you take forever to develop and complete a module. By that i don't mean copy / paste !

DON'T start 2modules at a time cause your bound to have more bugs than expected and your 2modules will look the same I mean really the same

Encourage competition, even if your competitor does a greater thing u can learn from its mistakes and create something even better but do it without postponing releases... you can always add your new stuff to a later version. And trust me no one builds a perfect module!

Look outside your ecosystem for inspiration otherwise you create just another module which will only get you reviews out of politeness even tho you lost night after night coding it and the reviews will only acknowledge the work but not the product.

Don't tie into 3rd party frameworks such as "smartobject" or "frameworks" everyone secretly hates both!

Anyway I do appreciate your work but you really need to make new battle plans

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We all hope that X3 will bring some order to it.

I would like to encourage all designers to actively participate in the X3 development and help us shaping the "X3 theme engine" in a way that will make XOOPS Modules:

- the easiest to develop themes/templates for
- keep them consistent in their "look & feel" based on the theme without any extra effort from the module developer or theme designer

If you have any ideas on how it should be done, please share them with us in the XE Forums.

@Michael I wasn't talking about core, i was talking about modules

And NO, thats not a consistent look and feel thats a XEROX machine.

Only consistency a module dev should take into consideration is the design of comments and design of notifications. Other than that it should be at designer's choice & skills & imagination.

All link directories module look the same, all download modules look the same, all news module look the same and it looks like its funner to clone and make it as your own... something wrong with that term anyone?! "Clone" u know...like identical? Guess individuality doesn't run in this part of woods.

If you bother to assume a module as your own and u bother to clone at least change its covers?! otherwise its just another Dolly

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I am looking for consistency of "Interfaces" i.e. that as a designer you need to take care of only one element, and everything else will be changed across the whole installation.

I don't want to have every module look differently, where I have to waste my time trying to learn it because the GUI is totally different from all others that I already have.

What I prefer is that the designers add new "skins/themes" to their modules, which I could utilize across the whole installation, if I like it, by copying it to my "system"

That's being "user/customer driven"

For me the best approach is still the jQueryUI approach, where I change the options in one location, and then everything else is following it across the whole installation.

I am all for individuality and creativity, but also for consistency of "look and feel" across the modules that I've installed.

I hope, we're wanting the same thing

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Thats laziness...are you still using a Nokia 3310 because the GUI of the Windows phone / Android / iPhone scared you?

I'm sure not.

And if you failed to see my point than i'm sure most will too and all xoops modules will ever be is an iteration of tables that start with outer end in outer and include th td even, td odd, etc

Which is why XOOPS is not what it was

Basically what you said is this...

NO, i won't make it easier for designers to improve on the core and i will force everyone that wants to step out the box to hack the core files and to spend triple the time to create custom templates when in reality they aren't needed


That said, have fun and continue to develop clones which look the same.

Maybe we can have the the slogan changed to XOOPS - powered by clones...cause after all if it doesn't look the same like other 1million websites than it must be wrong.

Consistency God damn it, Consistency...sorry I meant td.class-even = Consistency / td.class.odd = Consistency

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Laziness is good!

The same as good is better than perfect

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If you want to have an infrastructure that will enable you to create some very innovative GUI designs, I'm all for it. And in X3 we should make every effort to make it happen, i.e. to make it life extremely easy for our designers.

To give you a good example - if you look at RMCommon from Eduardo. He included "RedMexico" theme there, and with this combination, all his modules look and behavior totally differently from a typical XOOPS Admin GUI (it's actually a WP look & feel). And it's good if everybody could change the overall look and feel to anything they want, like Eduardo did with his GUI.

So if you want to change XOOPS modules to look like iPhone, we need to make it easy for you as a designer to make it happen.

Now the question is - what do you need in Core, so it's easy for you to make it happen?

And what kind of guidelines should the module developers be following, so your designs behave as they they should?

No no no :)

See you misunderstood...

Take the view profile page in the core good old default page of a user ...NOT the profile module

There's bunch of icons / buttons on top of the page which allow edit, delete, etc

Those buttons are a no man's land, do they have any class? do they have any id?

Why do you think WP can afford shortcodes for all form elements up to every single no matter how small button...cause the core has classes and id's :) that way if i want to change colors when switching themes, my buttons don't get left behind to the design of the previous theme.

As is now i have to hack the core or make my own templates and all that just because of the buttons...isn't it a bit absurd ?

Doing that small thing and cleaning up all forms will give you the consistency you want

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It is, and you shouldn't have to do it. Being lazy is a good thing

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Please point those kind of things in a systematic way, so we can make sure that it won't happen in X3.

Again, please get involved in the X3 Theme Engine - we need to know how to make the life of designers easier.

Is not affecting me... us the designers alone.

If i have to make a template for each section I want to have proper 2011 style buttons then user will end up having all templates doubled in the theme and he/she might not like it

And trust me XOOPS is far from consistency...Now i don't mean the admin, thats just peachy :) I mean the files.

There are forms in php files when actually they should be in the template, and that bumps me back to... if you must have forms all over the place, at least give them unique id's or classes so the theme a user puts in will affect and the style of the forms, buttons.

I can have a pink theme (not that i'll actually have a pink theme :) ) and my buttons will still be grey or white or browser's style