[jquery-ui-dev] Themeroller Feedback

[Brandon Aaron]

I was walking someone through the process of creating a new theme for a project that uses jQuery UI and when he clicked "Download theme" he thought it broke. It was a pretty jarring experience. I mean the button says "Download theme", not "Next" or "Build jQuery UI with this Theme".

It seems like most of the time if I go to themeroller directly than I'm there to generate a theme and probably already have a build of jQuery UI. However, if I go to UI builder I can understand being taken to the theme builder. So I propose two buttons. The primary button to download just the theme and the secondary button to download the theme + get jQuery UI.

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Brandon Aaron

[Scott Jehl]

Thanks Brandon
I agree this process could be clearer. We also had a thread discussing
this a while back and Paul said he wanted an option for downloading
"just a theme" as well.

Having this choice from ThemeRoller would be nice, but there are some
things to consider

1. If we go straight to zip, we're going to have to assume a version
number of UI. Currently, Theming is dramatically different in 1.6 and
1.7. The download builder makes this choice very clear and gives you a
demo page with your corresponding version. There's no choice of
version number in ThemeRoller itself, so we'd have to go with latest,
which will cause issues with the many users still on 1.6.

2. Would "Download Theme" include all UI widgets in the zip? I assume
it would, so we can include the demo page and give people a good
starting point. Users can currently get "just a theme" using the
builder, but it's not the default behavior because the demo page is so
useful for those getting acquainted to UI.

3. While using ThemeRoller, you have no way of knowing that the
download builder has options to further manipulate your theme to
prevent conflicts with other themes on a single page (through CSS
scoping and folder name). I'm not sure if we'd be able to communicate
the availability of these features in the download button choices. We
purposely kept these features out of ThemeRoller's UI because we never
want Theme URLs floating around that are scoped to a particular UI
(would cause mass confusion).

4. Currently the bookmarklet's ( http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/developertool/
) download button goes straight to zip. We're able to do this for 2
reasons:
a. it only works on UI 1.7, so we know the version number for sure
b. if you're using the bookmarklet, we can assume you're theming a
widget already and do not need to build a download

So the bookmarklet is covered, though you can't get to the download
builder from the bookmarklet (it would need to launch a new window I
guess since it's in an iframe). This may be something we want to
address.


It may be better if we just change the button now to say "Build Your
Download" or what you said so it's at least clear where you're headed,
but maybe we could figure out a split button or something that
addresses your concerns.

Thoughts?

[Jörn Zaefferer]

I'd like to the primary usecase I see for Themeroller, which just
describes how I'm using it so far and will be in the next few weeks
due to a current project.

I've got jQuery UI (a current RC, something close to 1.7) with a few
components and the default theme deployed on my project. Happended a
few weeks ago. Now the design of the site got updated a lot, and I
want to update the theme. So I'll got to Themeroller, configure it to
match the new design, and hit download. Latest version is fine, I
don't need components (all in place) and I have only that one theme,
so no need for customizing it further.

Does it make sense to optimize for this case?

Jörn