Feedback on integrated Viper Guestbook skin

[Tranz]

I got permission from the author of Viper Guestbook to release my custom guestbook skin that integrates the guestbook into Coppermine gallery. I just need to have him approve the skin before I can release it.  Before I submit the skin to him, I would like feedback from Coppermine users on how the skin looks in the various Coppermine themes.

Here is my guestbook. Please use the theme selector to view the guestbook in the various themes.

I am interested in feedback on:
- layout/placement of elements (not everything is enabled since this is my production guestbook)
- color/style of elements

When making recommendations for style class changes, please keep in mind that it would have to work across all the themes.

Any page that shows up in a popup window is likely to be unformatted since I have not worked on those pages yet.

Thank you.

PS. He also gave me permission to make a plug-in so that the guestbook can be easily installed and integrated using Coppermine 1.4's plugin manager. However, that is a few months down the road.

[Tranz]

hmmm... I hope silence means approval. I am just about done with the skin. There are a couple of things I need the guestbook author to help me figure out and then I will submit the files for his approval.

[Joachim Müller]

hm, I guess you don't want feedback on the guestbook script itself nor my ideas on the usage of guestbooks, but just the looks, so here goes:

• the smileys need to be redone to work on dark backgrounds (transparency issue).
  
• The bbcode help page ("Show allowed BBCode") needs to have the skin applied as well.
  
• The navigation items ("View guestbook | Sign guestbook |  Statistics |  Search") should have the same color (blue instead of ornage) as the secondary navigation of your overall (coppermine) site ("FAQ ::  Register ::  Login") and the same delimiters should be used (either "::" for both or "|")
  
• just a matter of taste: the background color of your input fields is set to light green (on your overall site), which is just "one color too much" for my taste, I'd go for medium grey or light red to "repeat" the overall basic colors of your site.

This is not meant as "nagging", just the stuff that might need improvement in my eyes. Nice overall work though!

Joachim

[Tranz]

Thank you for the feedback, GauGau. 

I took some of the smilies from Coppermine and renamed them to match. There were some I could not match up from the cpg set. I'll see about fixing transparency for the remaining files.

One of the things I need to get help from the author is the skinning of the popup pages. Basically, those pages don't have the cpg headers so I don't know how to get them to know which css stylesheet to use. Maybe I can pass the theme information in the URL?

I thought about having the menu match the secondary menu of coppermine, but then I saw how Fruity handled the secondary menu and didn't think that would look too good to have more than one set of menus like that. Another thing is that the separater is theme-specific and I don't think the guestbook script can get that information from theme.php. However, there appears to be a glimmer of hope in cpg 1.4, where the separator is a variable, $template_sys_menu_spacer, so maybe the guestbook script can access that variable.

The textinput color... yeah, I came up with the color on my laptop and it didn't seem so dominating until I saw it on my desktop monitor. I've been meaning to change it, though.

I appreciate your feedback and don't consider it nagging. I've been looking at this too much and need fresh eyes to look at this objectively. I'd rather fix issues before this is released and have people rag on it.

[Tranz]

update: I have posted the skin and instructions on how to use it here: http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=18738.0