New Template: Dark Matter

[patpro]

online at http://www.patpro.net/photos

works great, as far as I can say (latest safari, on latest Mac OS X available).

edit:
Just made a test on Firefox 3 rc on Mac, and it's ok.

[TheMarco]

BETA 14 is now available

Thanks a lot patpro! I had a look in IE as well and all seems fine.

I've uploaded beta 14 to the download page. I have made no changes so you don't have to get the uploaded file patpro!

[pengrus]

Great!

Hi Marco,
Could you please explain the thumbnails a little bit? Do they must be in crop/square form rather than original aspect? What is the best thumbnail size configuration?

Thanks!

[patpro]

Marco: you're welcome.

One thing I would LOVE, for future releases, is a list of:
- changed files
- removed files
- added files

The upgrade process would be far more easy and fast!

pengrus: as far as I know, you are free to use the aspect ratio of your choice, as long as the thumbnail width is 100px.
I choose square thumbnails, so their size is 100x100px, you can choose non-square thumbnails, say 100x75px for example, which is the recommended size.

[TheMarco]

@patpro in this case quite a lot changed as there were accessibility enhancements. Right now things are fairly stabilized. I will only fix bugs if any are found and not make any feature changes anymore. I would like to be able to announce the real 1.0 version soon!

I do have some plans for more advanced features but those will appear after 1.0. For example I'm thinking of a highly advanced search page with realtime AJAX results showing thumbnails. But as said, that's for AFTER 1.0. No more big changes before that.

[patpro]

Originally Posted by TheMarco

@patpro in this case quite a lot changed as there were accessibility enhancements.

ho I know that I merge your changes with my dark matter install online, so that I won't lose my modifications.
That would be just awesome being able to diff only files that changed since the next release, instead of make the diff/merge for every file.

[pengrus]

Marco,

Just a quick observation about your latest Beta 14 version. I noticed that in the image_template.html, this is the previous code:

		<script type="text/javascript" src="templates/darkmatter/js/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script> 
		<script type="text/javascript" src="templates/darkmatter/js/animation-min.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="templates/darkmatter/js/cookie-beta-min.js"></script> 
		<script type="text/javascript" src="templates/darkmatter/js/connection-min.js"></script> 
		<script src="templates/darkmatter/js/tools-effects-min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="templates/darkmatter/css/reset-fonts.css" />

And now you changed it to

		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script> 
		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/animation/animation-min.js"></script> 
		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/connection/connection-min.js"></script> 
		<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/cookie/cookie-beta-min.js"></script>		
		<script src="templates/darkmatter/js/tools-effects-min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
		<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.5.2/build/reset-fonts/reset-fonts.css">

Is it a good idea to link to an external site for the .js and .css files? What is the site yui.yahooapis.com went down? Then our sites won't be able to load, right? Also, because we are located all over the world, the loading of yui.yahooapis.com may feel very slow in other part of the globe...

Is this something that we can change?

Thanks,
Sean

[TheMarco]

I put some explanation about the Yahoo stuff in the README file:

YUI (THE 'STUFF FROM YAHOO' BEING LOADED)

Dark Matter was built with YUI (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/), an open source Javascript and CSS framework. The framework assets are loaded from Yahoo! servers. The reason for this is that Yahoo! serves these assets from an ultra fast content delivery network (CDN) which results in faster page loading than hosting the files yourself. If you're concerned about this, you can download the files from the YUI website and host them on your own server. I would however advise against this.

Hell will probably freeze over before the Yahoo CDN goes down so I'd leave it as it is. It's also WAY faster.

[patpro]

more importantly, it allows yahoo to update its framework (security patch for example).

[nosyt]

Hi, i'm LOVING the template. I got mostly everything to work smoothly after playing around with the settings and browsing the forums. However, i'm still running across one minor problem: the p_next.png/p_prev.png that pop up on either side of the image when you hover your mouse doesnt seem to be showing correctly. They pop up on the upper corners of the image rather than in the center, and they dont load correctly.

You can check it out at www.photoshite.net. Any ideas? I've tried reuploading the images, and I haven't messed with the code at all. Thumbnails are also set to 100x75 by 5. Please advice, thanks!