holch wrote: The templates that ship with Limesurvey should not be touched. This is why they are (or at least were) in a different folder than custom templates.
I didn't actually touch them per se.... well, I did at first because silly old me thought it would be easy to duplicate the css colour file and mod the colours. When it became apparent that this was way too difficult for the system to cope with I then reverted it, and just duplicated one of the existing themes on the basis it was a working theme and I could import and mod the way I wanted it. I can see the selectors/colours I needed to modify. It shouldn't be more difficult than a search and replace in a css file of say #123456 to #654321
Clearly not.
This is why you are supposed to make a copy of one of these templates via the template editor, when you want to modify things. This isn't rocket science.
Actually as someone who used LS years ago but not touched it for a long time I can tell you that template modification/override system is an unintuitive convoluted tricky mess, hence why I figured a simple manual replace in a css file would be much quicker and easier.
It is probably fine if you are used to it, and changed with it over time, but it isn't if it is slapped in your face.
So I want to modify Fruity and the green theme?? Nothing obvious about that.
Now you are playing with the idea to basically add a new color scheme, which is slightly different than to just change the colors of a template, you are adding a feature to a template, which might involve some more than just changing a CSS file, depending on how this theme was created and the function to change color schemes was implemented.
So changing a bit of text colour, radio button colour etc is so hard?? Why? JUST colours?? Nothing more. I am not trying to rebuild the whole system here. Someone spent a lot of time building a working template that I do not want to fundamentally modify, just recolour a little because I don't like any of the colours available. It really should be simple and intuitive and fast. It is anything but.
Take 'Copy to local theme and save changes'. Local? Where. This computer, another computer? It is meaningless.
CSS Files - Click theme.css It opens in the editor.
With a big DO NOT TOUCH sign near the top of the file. So a) why can you even open it and b) why can you 'Copy to local theme and save changes' especially when you have 'custom.css' ??
And where are the 'colour' css files eg sea_grass.css that it uses that I actually want to base my own colours on? ALL I want to do is change some really simple stuff - not rewrite the whole theme.
Completely illogical with no decent explanations.
At the beginning the template system of Wordpress was very simple, but also very limited. Today there are lot of things that you can do in a theme, but at the same time it has become a lot more complex to change a template for someone who doesn't have much experience in coding.
Gutenberg [slapshead] What a mess that is. All that glisters is not gold.
I have the same issue. Before it was simple to change the templates in Limesurvey and I could easily do it with my HTML/CSS/PHP skills. Today, with my skills being rusty and the system becoming more powerful (but also more complicated) it is not easy for me anymore.
I am not completely stupid. No, I am not a professional coder, but I run a lot of systems, code a bit in php and perl, and know my way about vaguely well.
It just shouldn't be this awkward and cumbersome and obscure. Sorry. I don't really want to be negative and I appreciate the efforts of the developers, but if you come to LS with no experience of it, it is not easy to do simple things like this. It is not self explanatory.
After much trial and error I have managed to hack about an extended theme. It is a truly painful experience just to change less than a dozen selectors with a different colour.
I also note that there seems to be no way to send test emails and preview links without actually activating the survey. That strikes me as somewhat illogical too. Hey ho.
Thanks.
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