Your Howto is brilliant and I did read it, like I read all the traffic on the community site. We'll maybe change the Iron Giant templates to use your approach, it is simpler.

please note: after spending all day messing with this (well actually… it took less than and hour. the other 12 hrs i have spent trying to get my head round ie effing 6 problem.) i have updated the how to.
http://community.wikidot.com/howto:fiddle-with-css-the-easy-way

Who knows meagain ? (I do)

Well, meagain's profile claims to be "AKA phil chett", but anyone can claim that!

AH!, but would they want to ????:-)

if i might make a minor suggestion
@ peiter
all your pretty coloured themes are based on green fresh.

on all your coloured themes i note that you have added lots of additional bits to each and every one.

a lot these could of been added to the one theme (fresh) , to be carried over automatically to those themes that import green fresh
Then the only thing you would need in each color , would be the color changes.

i got the idea from the "themes Site"

I generate the rainbow themes automatically - the entire page in fact - using some random code generator; I'll publish that sometime. Don't need to create a 'fresh' theme.

when i said

a lot these could of been added to the one theme (fresh)

i meant the green fresh theme. my apologies for the confusion.

Ah, sure. I preferred to leave the green-fresh theme alone, since each theme has an author and there are differences of taste (e.g. green fresh uses CAPITALS for its menus but I don't like that). In fact I like your idea of putting all the non-color CSS into a single parent theme, and may do that.

I noticed the changes you were making to the templates peiter and thought it was a really useful way of doing it… looking at meagain's tutorial it's even better and much simpler.

Using the "import external theme" to import an internal (same wiki) theme… brilliant!

@ leiger

a few have found that some custom themes can indeed completely screw up the admin:manage page.
worst offender is the "bloo" theme.

don't try it :-) take our word for it.

of course there is a fix, but for newbies they will be a screaming and a shouting.

i NEVER have my admin manage theme the same as the rest of a site. it makes it crystal clear where the hell you are and what you are doing. i would highly recommend that everyone employs this procedure.

Squark 25 Sep 2008, 10:02 +0200
We recommend NOT TO change the theme of admin:manage, let it stay a 'default', simple theme, like shiny, webbish etc. Definitely I do not recommend changing the theme to one of the custom themes, from skins.wikidot.com or themes.wikidot.com — often they are just not designed to be working with admin:manage pages. E.g. I do not design themes for admin:manage and I even do not test it there.

IMO admin:manage do not have to be eye candy.

No comment !

Wow, you two are really against this! =)

@meagain: I've heard of that problem actually… just earlier today. Didn't think about that.

@gerdami: I can't argue with Squark! =)

However, if a custom theme is proven to work I can't see any reason not to use it in admin:manage… I use custom themes in there myself because I dislike the default themes so much!

us old un's might not be quick off the mark, but we have wisdom.

the down side is that when we have been bitten, we take a lot of persuading that the dog don't bite no more.:-)

I tend to change my admin:manage to reflect the theme of the rest of the site, mainly because I don't like any of the default themes with the possible exception of Localize, but also because for me it keeps things across the site consistent. If a CSS change causes a problem - and occasionally I have made a typo so the import button is 8000px off to the right! - you can normally just change it back. I agree that new users probably shouldn't change it so the warning needs to remain, but those who are comfortable with themes and CSS shouldn't experience any particular problem.

Rob

..but then none of my sites use Bloo which I still can't work out the CSS for.

Rob

Pieterh will speak on this matter:

• I dislike (with a kind of slow "why is this different" irritation) having a different theme for admin. My assumption is that users will also dislike this even if they can't express that.

• For me, discovering how to create a single unifying theme for the site was important. The trick is to disable the nav:side for the admin category.

• Anyone who decides to revert the theme for admin: on the IronGiant sites will find me scowling at them and fixing things again. :-)

• Any theme that does not play nice with the decision to not show nav:side is in my view broken. The work-around is to create a customization specially for admin that shifts the main content back to the left-hand side.

• If we want to offer site owners the choice of broken themes, we should protect the admin category from theme changes, by creating two themes, as a matter of default.

Anyone who can propose better solutions, speak up. Perhaps a standard admin theme that looks like a console?

Oh, last thing: we fixed the custom theme 'Inherit from' selector so that Base is at the top where it should be. Gerdami, when people make a "classic mistake" it's because the tool is badly designed. Sorry about that.

I like meagain's proposal of a bright red warning theme for the admin category and will try this on the Iron Giant templates later on.

Indeed I think that all xyz-template.wikidot.com should have the theme for the admin: category linked to the external http://themes.wdfiles.com/local--code/silent-silver/3 which is close in color to official wikidot sites while the _default and other categories have their themes linked to the internal page admin:themes.

@gerdami: OK, done on all template sites except monobook-template and monodot, and project-template because I don't have admin access to that.