Themes and Skins

Intro

There has been interest in revisiting default themes and skins in uPortal. The concerns range from inflexible design to access for the impaired. This page has been added to promote collaboration on efforts to design more flexible themes/skins which may be adopted as new defaults for uPortal. One desirable outcome of these efforts would be easy adoption of skins developed by others so that implementations might have a repository of base skins to choose from thereby fulfilling the needs of the all individuals within their respective communities.

Goals

• Valid XHTML/CSS supporting a broad range of standards compliant browsers
• Presentation controlled through the use of CSS with simple markup expressing content
  • Graceful degradation in user agents that do not support css.
  • Support for mobile browsers
  • Support for better print layouts
• Accessibility (508, W3C Accessibility guidelines?)
• Support internationalization
• Common markup and CSS naming conventions to allow channel developers to produce "widgets" like toolbars, tabular displays, etc. while still allowing individual portals to customize their appearence in a standard fashion.

Contributors/Interested Parties

• Jason Jason (Rutgers University)
• Mark Sincock (Cornell)
• Former user (Deleted) (Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center)
• B. Collier Jones (Virginia Tech)
• tim carroll (University of Illinois)

Resources

• Chico State Portal Web Strategy

Roadmap

UP 2.6, 2.5.x (Fall 06?)

1. Initial XHTML, CSS selecter naming conventions (id & classname)
   • Page structure including elements and logical layout
   • Conventions for id/class names (e.g. channels/portlets, controls, headings)
   • Support new features such as page refreshes linking to channel anchors
   • Should follow JSR-168/WSRP Conventions as closely as possible
2. Sample/default CSS skin
   • Initial Layout for SLM & DLM based Layouts
   • Serve as a model for future skins/institutional customization
   • Provide basic styles & layout for screen, print & mobile.
   • Logical breakup for layout/styles/print/etc.
   • Place to experiment with CSS skin structure & directory layout
     • perhaps explore how to have skins/layouts with shared common elements

Timeline (updated 4/19/06)