I finally upgraded to Elgg 1.5 the other day. I was frustrated that custom themes were broken in this version, but I got over it. It is worth the upgrade with all the improvements. There are still no custom blog title tags, but that is easy enough to fix yourself.
Now, that custom themes no longer work, I decided to modify the default theme. It is not that hard to modify default views in Elgg, if you know what you are doing, but in doing this, I realized a fundamental problem with the default theme. The default theme should be a plugin rather than part of the core files. Because it is not, if you want to modify the default theme at all, you have to create a plugin.
Let’s say that you want to add Google analytics to your template. Unless you want to modify the core files, which you shouldn’t, you have to create a plugin. This should be much easier. Compare with WordPress. WordPress comes with a default theme. To make changes, it is easy to modify, add a new one or make your own. It is not easy to do this in Elgg.
Another problem is that a custom theme is the same as a plugin, so when you are looking at your list of plugins, it is hard to tell which ones are themes. Also there is no preview for themes, not even a thumbnail.
So for the next version of Elgg, I would break out the default theme as a plugin. Then I would separate the themes from the plugins in the backend. This will make it much easier to customize your themes in Elgg.
I would also like to see the HTML and CSS cleaned up a bit so that we don’t need to have 20+ CSS files to create a theme (20+ is just for the core plugins that ship with Elgg).
Also, the use of PHP to generate the CSS makes impossible to use popular front end development tools like Firebug, Coda, CSSEdit, etc without coding your own custom header that directly links to each CSS file (as a real CSS file). The CSS files should not contain any PHP. That’s just wrong in my view.
What a Bad Fu*k**ing idea to generate the CSS from PHP. How can I modify that?
easy make a css file drop it in your web root or wherever and then change the meta tag easy-peasy-12-threesy
I have spent hours and hours simply trying to find out how to change the dedede body background to an x and y repeating image.
Try searching it…what a fucking disaster elgg is. There is no forum, just a confused mass of of unhelpful bollocks…
I give up in disgust
Yes, i agree..
stupiest idea is to use php for css output.
Makes the use of css developing tools useless.
the forum there is a disaster, no idea where to search for what…