Please Help Me Test a New Skin

Your download link doesn't work. But I'd be happy to give it a try.  I have a test site I never use, so this would make me use it for a bit. 🙂

barb

Hi Kali,
be happy to help out. I have just downloaded and installed it on my test side  (Babaca, looks like that link must have been fixed).

my test site is here:
http://www.pretendercentre.com/renewal/efic/index.php?skin=busy

my preferred browser is opera, but i also have ie7 and firefox installed too.

will let you know if i run into troubles.

First report
few things i am noticing right off the bat:
1. there doesnt appear to be an obvious link to account info  (i found under login, duh to me,)
2. the footer text is hard to see for the home link
3. when you hover on the account info link, the text becomes almost impossible to see

i do like the layout, nice and simple, very clean.

Okay, I finally installed this on my test site (that I forgot the password, then had to search around here to figure out how to get the admin password to work)...

The test site is: http://babacat.freehostia.com

Except for placement of Account Info (which if I hadn't read Jacci's comment I don't know that I would have found it very quickly), the skin looks pretty darn good. I notice (and unfortunately didn't get a screen grab) that at one point when I was validating a story and clicked on the Home link that the format was kind of squished together in Firefox. But after it was validated when I refreshed it seemed to right the problem.

I will try and replicate it again to see if I can get a screengrab.

But so far it's very nice and I like it.

Yeah, it looks very good. Very clean cut, and the triple boxes at the top are not messy even though there are more than 2 of them. 🙂 Lovely skin.

the line for
Remember Me Go Register
| Lost Password
is kind of weird, because they split. On my eFic, I think I added a couple of br for the block, but that only works if you don't have any horizontal log-in areas where the links go across the top in any other skins on the site.

On the Browse page, the GO button for the sorts is a little lost on the next line by itself on babaca's copy, but that's something that will be different on everyone's archive depending on characters and classifications. I try to center my sorts to avoid the Go button being too left by itself.

http://babacat.freehostia.com/browse.php?type=recent

(babaca, I don't know you are aware, but there is an error on that page:
Warning: Cannot use a scalar value as an array in /home/www/babacat.freehostia.com/modules/recommendations/otherresults.php on line 67)

I really like the graduated colors. Good job!

You might want to add some white space between the sorts and the Titles bar under them. I think it makes it look a little crowded when they tough.
http://www.pretendercentre.com/renewal/efic/browse.php?type=titles

Do the Site Info, Featured, and Log-in box have to be part of the header, and then part of every page? How would it look if people only enabled that part for the index?

I use Firefox.

kali, have you ever thought about using custom featured images/ribbons for your skins?

I need to remember to download the later recommendations module. I noticed it last night but was too lazy to do anything about it.

Thanks for the feedback! I think I have fixed all the issues except for the login block (because I'm too tired at the moment to figure out how to work with the custom block tpls) The updated .zip file has been uploaded, you really only have to replace style.css, header.tpl and footer.tpl.

The blocks are set to always be on in variables.php. Users who don't want the block on every page will have to move the code to the index.tpl (this info will go in my readme files) or deal with the collapsing blocks

Thanks again for helping me out!

This may only be a Firefox 3beta thing, or a linux thing... but even after uploading your new files when I'm on ubuntu it looks like this:
looks like png doesn't work here but this link should.

The lower half looks smushed together... I'm having issues with the statistics box which someone has state does work in the script earlier.

Here it is in IE7. There's an error with recommenders that I've fixed in panel but hasn't fixed itself in site statistics. Here it's probably what smushes the screen in Linux but it mostly behaves in Windows except for the site stats being too long.If I put it in narrative it's much shorter.

barb

Edit: I forgot freehostia doesn't allow hotlinking... the links should work now.

Thanks to IE refusing to cooperate with varying heights, the header has a fixed height. Just increase it to accommodate the extra data in your info block.  🙂

New one for you:

Demo: http://www.made-by-kali.com/eFiction30/index.php?skin=superstar
Download: http://www.made-by-kali.com/eFiction30/skins/superstar/superstar.zip

Again, not really ready for a live site. I originally created this skin for a specific site, so I'm mainly concerned about getting rid of all site references.

Kali, I love superstar!  I saw it on your site and almost cried when I couldn't find the download for it, lol!  I've been playing with the CSS and graphics today, customizing it for my site, and I noticed a couple of typos you might want to fix.

Line 148 = #footer a:{color:#fe6000;}  --> You don't need the colon.  Remove it, and it should work properly.

Line 351 =  color: #fe6000:  -->  Same issue  🙂  Should be a semi-colon at the end of the line.

I'll let you know if I find anything else.

D'oh. You would think after all these years I wouldn't do stuff like that. Thanks for the info, if it's in one css file, I have to go fix all 3.

Heh, we all make typos, especially when it's only a question of the shift key.

I don't see a Logout button on your skin.  I added it in the top menu bar, and at the bottom of the left hand column.

I ran into the issue that if you change the #container background color to anything but white, it screws up the registration page.  The color will bleed behind most of the registration forms.   I haven't quite figured out the best way to fix it, because making it white screws up my banner if I want to put a margin-left on that.  Or it might be able to be fixed by editing the HTML on the registration page. 

Here's a link to my archive:  http://archive.starwarschicks.com

Interesting. I'll have to play with it some more today.