Why conventional layout

[meetdilip]

For me, the greatest attraction in NodeBB was the tiled categories. Why did you switch to conventional layout ?

[teh_g]

@meetdilip You can use one of the other themes.

Lavender and Vanilla both use tiles.

[julian]

Lavender was a very love-hate sort of theme. We found that Persona hit many more targets in terms of user experience, as well as to decrease the "shock value" of NodeBB as a whole. Lavender is still very much supported however

[Tebo]

@julian Are there any plans to incorporate optional tiling in Persona? I ask because I've noticed it seems to have broader support and more TPL files for widgetizing.

[julian]

@Tebo That would've been because widget areas were removed from Persona in anticipation for a widgets refactor that got delayed, so we've added them back in now.

[Tebo]

Is it difficult to add widget areas to a theme's TPL files?

[yariplus]

@Tebo Here's the commit where I added the widget areas back. (plus one where I derpped)

https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-theme-persona/commit/51df7421900c9bb3e5a9e27c3844a99e1429dafa

[Tebo]

@yariplus Nice! That's actually pretty straightforward.

[meetdilip]

Is it possible to choose Lavender or Vanilla on this forum ? Like, change theme from profile or so ?

[AOKP]

@meetdilip nope.

[teh_g]

@meetdilip said in Why conventional layout:

Is it possible to choose Lavender or Vanilla on this forum ? Like, change theme from profile or so ?

I know this is an option I'd love to have. The skin option is great, but being able to switch between themes would be even better.

[Tebo]

@teh_g I reckon it's not currently on the table because there is site functionality tied up in the themes. For example, if you change themes you'll notice all unsupported widgets are dumped in the control panel. There isn't a standard for widget areas (that's observed, at least) even between pre-packaged themes.

I'm guessing that's not the only difference, either, but after my initial setup I didn't really look into it too much.

[Jenkler]

Persona is the best thing that has happend to NodeBB. Love it

[julian]

@Tebo said in Why conventional layout:

For example, if you change themes you'll notice all unsupported widgets are dumped in the control panel.

Yes, this is done on purpose because of the aforementioned reason. It's possible that we could preserve widget if the theme supported widget areas of the same name (even partially, e.g. both Material and Persona have sidebar, so keep the sidebar widgets), but there's no guarantee that a sidebar on Material will look the same on Persona

[meetdilip]

Supporting theme switch would a nice option.