What is Happening with Chameleon?

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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by 3Di »

HaioPaio wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 5:54 pm
Kailey wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 3:31 pm We are aware of this topic
I know. Most likely, nobody expected the opposite.
LOL, exactly,

What a new! 8-)
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by david63 »

Kailey wrote: Sun May 08, 2022 3:31 pm We are aware of this topic
Thank you for that, but an answer to the question would be preferable
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by 3Di »

^^ What is happening?

Nothing special... a dead project that's it!
You have to have attributes to be able to wear titles like that, especially on your own...
Where for attributes I mean at least the knowledge of phpBB "inside", also TWIG and PHP.

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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by Toxyy »

Meis2M wrote: Wed Apr 27, 2022 4:04 am today is different , people only work with money. the age of working free is over.
Much of the traffic has gone elsewhere where forums used to be the nexus of conversation 10-20+ years ago, now the userbases are becoming more niche per community and there are simply more options not funneling the previous traffic into this forum that will learn phpbb well enough to be able to contribute. There are enough sites using phpbb, that if the web administrators and extension writers out there are willing, may eventually happen upon the github or the issue tracker here.

This next blurb is my personal experience as a freelance developer, sharing some insight on how I view contributing at my perceived skill level. I have had an interest to work on some of the issues on the tracker I see in my free time, though I'm simply not confident enough in my knowledge of the system, even at this point, to address the concerns of a lot of the PRs, nor have I been making contact with the dev team to get some insight on their process either. If I were to contribute, I would need to be delegated tasks and be able to make sure that my train of thought on the bug/feature is in line with the project. I once made a small extension that replicated an internal feature I didn't know existed, luckily it was pretty simple so no big time loss, and perhaps that's my bad for not knowing the system well enough (even now). It's not that I'm not capable or trust in the review process, these are just my anticipations and reasoning (read excuses) for not having done more.

Tldr, I am willing but unsure of my current effectiveness working on one off issues alone, and understand that I shouldn't really expect any help in that regard less I apply to be a part of the team and that's not in my current interest.

I'm very comfortable making any type of extension, I haven't tackled something as involved as Advanced Points per se, but I've delved in just about every component in the extension I believe and could develop a large component such as that given enough time. Certainly more time than it would take 3Di or mrgoldy as they've mastered their handle on this framework.

I realize my post lost a bit of direction, so I'll make some sort of conclusion: if any team members would by willing to do my hand holding I described up there, I'm willing to work on some stuff every now and again in my spare time if you think having me attend to anything would be beneficial or load easing on yall. Though be warned that I hate creative front end development, I can do whatever is necessary for the component I currently work on but in the scope of something like Chameleon as I'm extremely picky, don't understand front end architecture design as well as back end, etc.

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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by Marc »

The progress on Chameleon has certainly not been on the level we were hoping for. Part of that might be certainly be caused by team members being busy with other aspects of life and not being able to invest as much time as they might want. Another part might also be due to work not being as visible. Speaking for myself I have spent considerable time on removing HTML from PHP files as well as improving the base for having push notifications in phpBB. Both of these have not yet been integrated into phpBB but should benefit phpBB in the next feature release.

The style is not just about replacing some HTML & CSS files but there is also quite a bit of backend work needed. For that we need the help of you, the community. Have a look at the topic you quoted in the first post: viewtopic.php?f=691&t=2485796
There is also a link to the area51 topic that outlines some of the backend work needed: https://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopi ... 81&t=61766
PlanetStyles.net wrote: Wed Apr 27, 2022 1:08 am The problem is that skilled developers are focussed on maintaining their commercial offerings. There is no incentive for volunteer here.
As you also pointed out, the phpBB style should be a good base to build upon. Is it not that base that will also benefit you as a developer selling commercial styles? How is that not an incentive to improve the phpBB style? An improved base style will also gather phpBB more interest which in return will also increase the size of the target audience for your premium styles.
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by halil16 »

Marc wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 7:00 am having push notifications in phpBB
Wonderful! I was trying to get a paid extension for that too. Then i have to wait.

It is not expected to operate or develop like a company in general, I suppose. However, phpBB is a great community. However, the slow development makes people tired. Hard work.
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by PlanetStyles.net »

Thank you Marc for offering some additional context.
Marc wrote: Mon May 09, 2022 7:00 am Is it not that base that will also benefit you as a developer selling commercial styles? How is that not an incentive to improve the phpBB style?
This is a fair question to ask, thank you for the opportunity to share some thoughts here. It's something I've thought about a lot too, and truthfully I don't really know. There's a few different ways I look at this:
 
  1. On one hand, the commercial style market is successful specifically because:
    • Prosilver's outdated and doesn't actually look very good, and:
    • Most free style authors don't have the skills to turn it into something good. Lots of dodgy recolours in the CDB, but very little innovation
    So from a selfish point of view, I know that the longer phpBB continues to use Prosilver, the longer I have a viable side business. This has been the case since Rocketlab entered the phpBB market many years ago.
     
  2. On the other hand, 99% of time developing custom styles is spent fixing prosilver - and this is not an exaggeration. We know that basically every element has its own CSS definition, the only way to make it workable is by using lots of dirty CSS overrides. For example: My free prosilver dark style was 4-5 days work for a light -> dark recolour. The commercial Milk theme was probably somewhere from 2-3 months. My new design (in-progress) has been significantly more. And this time is spend fixing borders, margins, padding, border colours, 5 different button styles, etc etc. Very boring work.

    It's not that easy to integrate a CSS framework (eg: bootstrap) around Prosilver, because support for extensions / tempalate events needs to be preserved. So the sooner we ditch Prosilver, the sooner that styling can become fun again. This is appealing and makes me think: perhaps I should contribute.
 
But is Chameleon the answer? As a software engineer / developer, would you rather not work with a fully documented CSS framework that's well maintained and always up to date with modern standards? Is it too late to ditch Chameleon and embrace the excellent options that are now available?
 
Let's be progressive and look to the future :)
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by Marc »

To follow up on that, we are certainly open to suggestions. What would you consider as excellent options?
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by AlfredoRamos »

I would consider Tailwind.

I even made a test style for that, however the back-end really needs to separate the HTML.
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by Mannix_ »

Let's not clutter html we can use Open props !!! Making style with bootstrap was a pain in a butt :D
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by danieltj »

AlfredoRamos wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 12:55 am I would consider Tailwind.

I even made a test style for that, however the back-end really needs to separate the HTML.
I'm sure Tailwind is great and everything but it'd be great if phpBB stuck to using as little frameworks as necessary to make the default style. As Christian said above, pro silver is rife with all kinds of bad CSS hacks and it would be nice if whatever this new style was, had as little design to it as possible so people can make custom styles that completely change the look of the software through custom styles (free or paid).

Once gripe I have with forums, particularly XenForo but phpBB isn't immune to this is how most forums look exactly the same as the default style. I'm of the opinion that if you're using a style (or theme) that isn't the softwares default, it should look nothing like it otherwise you might as well use the default style.

Chameleon has too much design to it. It's too pretty.

I want something with black and white text and borders. No fancy graphics or complex design choices. In an ideal world phpBB would take inspiration from Gov.uk and go with a design that is plain and easy to digest.
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by PlanetStyles.net »

Tailwind would be wonderful. Tailwind UI would have been glorious on top of that, but the license terms don't permit re-distribution in themes :cry:

Although I still think it's viable to release an unflattering default theme (a la wordpress) and let the community run riot with it. I suspect phpBB would attract many more style authors (and possibly extension authors) if we used a widely adopted framework.

If not tailwind, any well supported and well documented framework would represent progression imo. Bootstrap, Bulma, Foundation etc..

If developers can reference quality documentation and hand-pick elements off the shelf, I think we're in a good place :)
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by Toxyy »

PlanetStyles.net wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 11:12 pm If developers can reference quality documentation and hand-pick elements off the shelf, I think we're in a good place :)
Basically this, though I'm not a fan of having to learn new syntax sugar relative to whatever new stuff is added like that. I'm more prone to agree with danieltj that it should use as little frameworks as possible to get the job done, though I'm not an explicit style developer myself. I just revamp themes I find here and use them as a base for clients to look like whatever they need, usually to match their main site, I've built a couple almost from scratch but I would not say I have the most expert opinion on style craft. With that said, I propose that even further, you could have a tailwind/bootstrap/whatever base style built off of the actual base style, that way it can go in whatever direction gets the most attention (given that docs/element examples are available for them). Unsure if this is optimal or would complicate things.
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by AlfredoRamos »

Mannix_ wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 6:21 am Let's not clutter html we can use Open props !!! Making style with bootstrap was a pain in a butt :D
If that was meant for my previous comment, I would say the "cluttering" (I don't see it that way), in my opinion would be a good trade-off.

Besides, you can still generate helper classes like .panel or .card just by using the @apply directive.
danieltj wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 7:19 pm I'm sure Tailwind is great and everything but it'd be great if phpBB stuck to using as little frameworks as necessary
Well, that's precisely I would consider Tailwind, since it's minimal at production since it removes unused classes and directives, and combined with tools like cssnano you also minify the stylesheets when building the theme.

You want to create a custom theme with different color schemes? No problem, just change the background, text, shadow or border color classes.

Want a built-in dark mode? just add the dark: helper classes.

Do you want to totally change the layout? just change the grid or flex classes. You could even do it without changing the HTML markup as you would do with Bootstrap, for example.

I'm a software engineer, not a graphic designer, UI or front-end guru so I might not be able to keep a very deep discussion regarding front-end, but certainly I am not trying to belittle the work that is being done with base-l CSS framework.

I'm sharing my opinion regarding development part, it's easier to use a well-known, documented and (more importantly) mature framework, than developing one from scratch.

Sometimes it's even required to create your own small framework, but I don't see it being required for phpBB.
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Re: What is Happening with Chameleon?

Post by danieltj »

PlanetStyles.net wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 11:12 pm […]

If developers can reference quality documentation and hand-pick elements off the shelf, I think we're in a good place :)
I agree that more, better documentation is needed. That’s one department that phoBB severely lacks. Even the extension documentation is extremely barebones although some people would like to disagree.

I think a WordPress-esque default theme would be perfect because it would make things easier to customise and design. Prosilver is visually very nice and that’s its problem, it’s already a design that you basically need to reverse engineer to change it.

That’s why I don’t like Chameleon because it’s too much of a finished design which I’m my view defeats the object of a default style completely.

I’d help contribute but again, contribution to phpBB is painfully hard. There’s literally no onboarding process so getting newbies with less experience just doesn’t happen.
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