New Templates Management in Dolphin 7.1 (Osho) + Extra Template

Good news for template developers and all web-masters that like to change the look of their Dolphin sites! Dolphin 7.1 is going to have an automated Templates management system in Admin panel.

We have added templates installation and made some improvements in upload/files handling, so Modules will also now upload  with much better success rate. 

The new Templates management system is in "Settings" section and it looks like this...

...as you may see it lets you choose the default template and preview other installed templates. The thumbnail picture, however, is provided by template developer, so it may be a sample screenshot or whatever else.

Add New Template

Adding a new (properly packaged) template is a breeze now. It literally takes a couple of seconds and looks like this...

Template packages should come in .zip format, so you just upload the archive and the rest happens automatically. The newly installed template will show up in "List" tab.

Settings

The "Settings" tab features some basic configuration preferences, most importantly the option to allow users to choose templates (if you have more than one installed).

The "New" ALT Template

For a long while Dolphin was packaged with only one default template - UNI ("base" doesn't count, as it is more like a "skeleton" required for other templates to work). From now on, we're adding a second template, called "ALT". 

Now, you may already know our position about providing additional templates with social networking software. In short: we think it's wrong to mass-distribute custom-looking templates. So, ALT isn't that much different from UNI and is provided only as an example of how a few quick changes to UNI can create a different feel, and also to give a better idea of how Templates management system in Admin operates. It's there for convenience, not actual looks, so don't mind corny clouds.

ALT has a different background image and a slightly re-adjusted color scheme - that's all. It looks like this (yeah, I love these Vonnegut-style "it looks like this..." leads)...

Text Logo

One more little feature that you may notice is the new "logo". It is basically a simple site name text with some CSS styles. You can, naturally, upload your own custom image logo instead. We decided to go for a text logo by default, because we see more and more sites that don't have established identity or company behind them, and web-masters struggle to come up with a good looking logo image from the beginning. So, many would do away just fine with the site name like, say, CupertunoPlumbers for example, shown as a styled-up text. At least until they have a proper logo ready.  

This way, one can quickly create a somewhat customised look without having much more than a background image handy or a background color in mind.

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We expect the new changes to inspire designers to come up with new cool templates for Dolphin 7.1 and we hope web-masters would be a little more compelled to try different looks for their Dolphin-based communities.

Stay tuned!