Allen: Welcome to the first ever UBBDev Discussion Roundtable.
I'm joined today with fellow UBBDev staff members Deb, LK and Tacks. The topic of today's discussion is the new Rotating Styles Hack being featured on UBBDev and the cool new styles developed for it. First, let's get started on the color styles. How did they come to be?
Tacks: We wanted to design some new themes for a Rotator Script that Borg had put together. So several people began submitting some new ideas. After Allen said he wanted a common thread between them, I put together a set of 5 themes that were pretty much the same except for the table headers and the graphics. It was nice work, but still not quite what he wanted.
Deb: The colors were a bit too bright, and needed to be toned down.
Tacks: Yeah, toned down...how many times did I hear that.
Deb: I came up with a couple of colors that I thought would work, and asked Tacks to help me with them.
Tacks: Deb's colors were great, and seemed to be what Allen was looking for, I found a couple of other colors that were along the same mindset and we went from there.
Deb: We started calling them the 'Dockers' styles, since they looked like the muted colors that you would see on a pair of Khakis.
Tacks: We started with each color, and then worked with different complementary shades that were a little lighter or a little darker.
Deb: But even then we had to make them tighter, because Allen wanted there to be the slightest difference between each day.
Allen: Well they are looking great. What was the approach with the graphics?
Deb: We played around with a lot of different things. We even had created sets of tubes for the post icons. That was a laugh as we were trying to edit the various files to get the tubes to work, then finally getting them to work, only to not really like how they looked. They were nice, but they stood out too much.
Tacks: So we went with the understated look. The standard post icons looked fine with all the colors, so we went to work on the buttons. We wanted to do something different, so we came up with a flat button, which was very basic, very clean. It had a complementary text and border color, and the buttons were transparent.
Deb: It's pretty neat, but if you look closely, you'll see that on the top they are against a darker background and on the bottom against a lighter background. It's the same button, but different; it's a little eye trick. It's more noticeable with the stars.
Tacks: Yeah, the stars are great. Rather than the standard star, we used an inverted star in a circle. Kind of like the old WW-I planes. The circle has the same dark color, and the center star is transparent. So again, it looks slightly different with the lighter and darker colors.
Allen: Well they are looking sweet, and the members seem to like them a lot. Which is your favorite?
LK: I like Frost the best, that's on Tuesdays.
Tacks: Yeah, Frost is my favorite as well. It's kind of funny because that we went live on a Tuesday, and that was the one the users saw first. They also seemed to like it best.
Deb: They're all great, but if I had to pick a favorite I would say the Moss and Olive color schemes.
Allen: What are the names of the different styles?
Deb: Mondays are Mist, Tuesdays are Frost
Tacks: Wednesday is Moss and...
LK: Thursday is Olive. Friday is Khaki
Deb: Saturday is Rose
Tacks: Sunday is Plum, and then we're back to Mist again!
Allen: Now to the script itself, tell me about it.
Deb: We had this script that Borg had written, but none of us knew whether or not it worked, or anything. Borg hadn't been around much, so I started looking around for another rotating script. I had a java one that I've used on my websites to rotate images, and thought maybe we could adapt it.
Tacks: I don't know Java, heck I don't know much of any language, so I figured I'd try from scratch. I had an idea of how it could work, and started slapping some code together. I got the thing to run as a stand alone perl script, but wasn't sure where to take it from there, so I passed it on to LK.
LK: Tacks sent me his code, which was brilliant from a theoretical standpoint, but he obviously knows nothing about cgi or programming for UBB. His perl skills are marginal at best, but he had some good ideas.
Tacks: I asked LK to clean it up a bit, instead he turned it into a full fledged hack within an hour or so. CP control, Wordlets, you name it.
LK: A lot of what it needed to do was already there. But there was a bit that needed to be fixed, plus I added in the control panel to make it easier to change settings.
Deb: and I worked with LK to get a couple of minor bugs worked out.
LK: The biggest problem was clearing the cache. When the colors flipped you didn't want pages coming out of the cache with yesterday's style, so that was something we had to add in.
Allen: Well it seems to be running fine. It's been up for a couple of weeks without breaking the board.
Deb: Yeah, it's a neat script, it's pretty compact and just does what it needs to do. It was a great feeling getting this thing to work, especially after having invested so much time on designing the schemes for it.
Allen: What else is in store for the rotating script?
LK: Well one thing that I'd like to do is tie the colors in with my calendar. This way when the colors on the site rotate, the calendar will change to complement them as well.
Deb: We also want to update some of the other pages on UBBDev, like the main page or the staff page, since they still have the older style.
Allen: Well the database has already also been updated and is looking good. So what's next for you guys?
Deb: We need to get the colors integrated with the other site pages, and are looking at ways to do that.
Tacks: We also have some other holidays that we need to create special themes for.
LK: and there are probably some other neat things that we can bridge off of with the script.
Deb: We're also looking at adding the other set Tacks designed to the database, so users can have a Rotating Prize Pack.
Tacks: Right now there are only 5 days, so I need to add a couple more and add a couple of more graphics. But someone may get some use out of them.
LK: We also need to document the hack, so that it can be released some day.
Allen: Well thanks for the insight, and great job to all of you on creating an great feature and some snazzy themes. That's it for us, and now back to your regularly schedule U-Zine.
