Talk:Newbie Guide: How to Patch Styles and Themes

Patch Check List

-- Usage rights (resource credits, credits in HTML or CSS comments, dw-free or nonfree)

-- No tabs

-- No trailing spaces

Styles (general):

-- Always set layout_authors

-- Tabula Rasa child whenever possible

-- Supports all column modes whenever possible and at least one one-column

-- Supports all options from Tabula Rasa

-- Custom props sorted into existing propgroups using _child

-- Custom props also sorted into existing /customize cats in the style.pm file.

-- Custom props follow naming standards

-- Check everything, everywhere. In particular don't forget: non-default column modes, modules in every available position, community accounts, unusually short or long elements (subjects, tags, titles, entries, comments, usernames,...), userpic stuff (no userpic, non-square userpics, smaller userpics), collapsed comments, bottomcomment area, reply page, quick reply, icon page, pagination links (reading, archive, comments and icon page), contextual pop-ups, navigation strip, page text (sometimes only visible when there are no entries on the reading page).

Themes (general):

-- Alphabetized themes

-- Two blank lines between each theme

-- theme_authors if theme author is NOT style author. Otherwise no.

-- Props separated by headers (Presentation, Page Colors, Entry Colors, Module Colors, Fonts and Images, in this order. )

-- Alphabetized props within each cat.

-- No empty props

CSS (general):

-- If TR child goes into function print_stylesheet () for styles. Otherwise goes into function Page::print_default_stylesheet.

-- Theme-specific CSS goes into function Page::print_theme_stylesheet()

-- No broad resets

-- Comment headers

-- Indents

-- Shorthand

Colors:

-- color_page_text in every theme

-- No half foreground/background combos (e.g. text color without background color)

-- Matching foreground/background combos (such as entry text color on entry background color)

-- Order in props for link colors: alphabetical so _link, _link_active, _link_hover, _link_visited

-- BUT order in CSS for link colors: hierarchical so a, a:visited, a:hover, a:active

-- Shorthand for color hex codes

Fonts:

-- Single quotes around font names with multiple words; no quotes otherwise.

-- No font_units settings if no font_size too.

-- No hardcoded font names

-- No hardcoded font sizes (some exceptions allowed)

Images:

-- No color profiles

-- Color-indexed PNGs whenever possible. JPGs with a lower res are sometimes a good alternative.

-- Common images in /commons

-- Follows file naming standards

-- Ninetydegrees (talk) 10:32, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

• Overall, pretty excellent! The one thing I would like (and am willing to try to compile) is to split off the list of stuff in 'check everything' to a more concrete list of all the major things to check - I know that would solve a lot of my 'oh, it turns out this layout breaks horribly if comments are disabled!' type bugs. --Momiji (talk) 08:37, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

• • Very good idea! Also two different lists (one for theme and one for styles) would be better I think.--Ninetydegrees (talk) 09:42, 12 July 2013 (UTC)