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Wanted: feedback on tundra and the dijit themes - visual nits, bugs, critiques

What's been bugging you with tundra/etc as a visual/graphic design? What causes you to override / extend it or even start a new theme? Lets use this thread to gather up all that feedback, then we can file bugs where appropriate and start fixing.

I'd really like to see the

I'd really like to see the inclusion of more commonly-used icons that "just match" the color and spacing of the dijit themes. Two that really stand out for me are "Magnifying Glass" icon for Search, and a "Funnel" icon for Filter.

I realize this is a bit of a stretch from Dojo's original mission, but having a set of common icons available would make Dojo so much more usable - especially for those who are trying to learn Dojo by grafting it onto existing back-ends. Otherwise, developers need to worry about integrating Dojo as well as finding matching icons to complete the GUI.

Re: Icons

Actually icons is a really good suggestion. Finding quality, liberally licensed icons is a real challenge and I dont see it written anywhere that the dojo toolkit only peddles javascript. First you have to find a designer though who can create and donate the icons under CLA.

templates for overriding theme

I find it hard to override a theme. There is some information in the dojo book, but what I am missing are a kind of master templates for the CSS files, so for e.g. bulk-override of colors one could just generate a new set of css files from those templates (could be any common template language, e.g. Django, which is used already in dojo). And *.psd files of all the images, so one could directly use those add new layers for a new theme.

I case I am totally wrong with this suggestions and there are better ways to streamline the creation of a new theme please let me know.

regards
Roberto

theme thoughts

Random thoughts (the best kind of thoughts) ...

1. I haven't really looked at the css at all, so this may be completely stupid, but a useful feature might be an easy way to change the color 'scheme' for a given theme .... in other words, perhaps 'soria' uses a few shades of blue, if I had an easy way to override that 'set of blue' with a 'set of green or red', that would be cool .. -- just the color set itself, no positional junk. No idea if that's really feasible, it's like 7am, but it's a thought...

2. I guess this isn't really theme-oriented, but I can't seem to do much with the dijit Tooltips -- the actual pop-up graphic I mean, not the text inside. In other words, I'd like to modify the background color of the entire tooltip, not just chunk in a span tag and change the text background color (which looks like crap). None of the themes show any examples of dijit tooltip modifications for color or position or anything like that (though I swear I saw some old, maybe 0.4 stuff that allowed you to postion & color tips maybe?).

3. A nice convenience for new users would be to default a 'require' for the default css theme file rather than throw some obscure error (obviously, it would likely be an optional default that could be turned off for folks that don't want help. .... maybe a console.log entry or popup or something to notify the user that they're in error. I know you guys don't typically want to bloat the code with stuff like this, but, as a new-ish user, I noticed that easily 50% of my initial errors were all require-releated (code and/or css). Perhaps default it off, but allow a way to turn it on...Eh, just a thought....

Re: tintable themes

There was a lot of work done with the Soria theme towards this end - a theme that you could plug your own color scheme into without having to create a new theme from scratch. But IIRC IE6 and its dodgy PNG support were insurmountable obstacles to that goal.

Something like this today would need some tooling - a server-side component or desktop app to generate the required graphics and substitute in the color values in the css. Very doable actually, just not as simple as changing some background-color/color values in the css.

blendy backgrounds

Also, we looked at enhancing our markup to allow color changes w/out new image files, ala Super-Easy Blendy Backgrounds, but decided it wasn't worth the trouble/added overhead to rendering each widget. Obviously a judgement call.

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Bill Keese
Project Lead (aka BDFL) of Dijit