Crazy thought of the day: maybe I can create my own #Friendica theme – if the skills required are CSS editing?
I used to be a web designer and I'm pretty familiar with these sort of tasks.
I absolutely LOVE Friendica's features but I'm not a big fan of its UX/UI - especially design elements. I'll look into creating my own theme and if it turns out to be a big fail, no biggie, at most I would have lost 2 hours.
I'll keep you all posted 💁♀️
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Adam
in reply to Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ • •The new/updated BookFace theme is actually pretty nice. That said, seriously omg please do this! 😀
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Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂
in reply to Adam • • •thanks, I'll check it out.
I quit Facebook in Jan 2017, so it's not like I missed its design. I'm a huge font nerd, so I wanted to spice up the Friendica design with nicer, cleaner and more modern fonts. Maybe I can check out BookFace and tweak it (if it's even possible)?
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Adam
in reply to Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ • •@Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂
Same! I'm definitely not longing for the look of Facebook, but the BookFace theme just looks like a more modern design than the standard options. I think it is just CSS too, so you should be able to tweak it.
gitlab.com/randompenguin/bookf…
Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂
in reply to Adam • • •like this
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Jerry on Friendica
in reply to Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ • • •Adam likes this.
Pygoscelis Papua
in reply to Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ • •@Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ Hi, I'm the designer of the "Bookface" makeover for Friendica that was mentioned. Yes, it is just CSS, but it's not a complete theme. It's a "scheme" for the default "Frio" theme (actually three schemes, Light, Dark, and Auto Light/Dark). As such I'm only able to restyle what is already there in the theme. A Friendica theme from scratch is a lot more complicated and uses Smarty3 templates.
"Bookface" started as a user content stylesheet I made just for myself to re-skin Friendica because it looked so outdated. I posted some screenshots of what Friendica looked like for me and others asked if they could have my stylesheet. Then @Matthias started adapting it to a Frio scheme which gave me clues how to do that. I ended up installing Friendica on my development server to work on it offline and then se
... Show more...@Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂ Hi, I'm the designer of the "Bookface" makeover for Friendica that was mentioned. Yes, it is just CSS, but it's not a complete theme. It's a "scheme" for the default "Frio" theme (actually three schemes, Light, Dark, and Auto Light/Dark). As such I'm only able to restyle what is already there in the theme. A Friendica theme from scratch is a lot more complicated and uses Smarty3 templates.
"Bookface" started as a user content stylesheet I made just for myself to re-skin Friendica because it looked so outdated. I posted some screenshots of what Friendica looked like for me and others asked if they could have my stylesheet. Then @Matthias started adapting it to a Frio scheme which gave me clues how to do that. I ended up installing Friendica on my development server to work on it offline and then set up a repository on GitLab to share my code. Which I admit is still pretty messy as I haven't gone back to clean it up yet.
A bunch of Friendica admins implemented Bookface despite my disclaimer that it was still a "work in progress" so now a lot of people can just pick it in their theme settings. But I've also kept updating the user stylesheet for those applying it with their browser if their instance hasn't implemented it (BTW I just released version 1.5 of both the server-side and client-side stylesheets).
I should probably say that I'm not actually part of the Friendica development team. I'm just a user. Though I'm a user with nearly 30 years of professional experience as a web designer and developer. This is what I do for a living (if you can call it living j/k). I've been told the Friendica team is looking for a UX/UI designer, but that would be biting off more than I can chew right now.
I should also probably say that I ended up on Friendica in part because of your blog posts about Fediverse platforms 🙂 as it sounded like the best replacement for Facebook, which I'm still in the process of leaving. Though I'm not new to the Fediverse either. I had an account on Diaspora many years ago (12? 14?) but the server I was on got shut down and my account deleted. I've been on Mastodon since Elon Musk first expressed interest in buying Twitter, but I never really liked Twitter so I'm not very active on Mastodon either. Feature-wise, though, I like Friendica the best! It just looked too outdated.
I was worried people might hate Meta so much my making Friendica look Facebookish would be ill received. I've been kind of blown away by the positive response to Bookface, considering it is just a stylesheet re-skinning the "Frio" theme.
Elena Rossini on GoToSocial ⁂
in reply to Pygoscelis Papua • • •Adam likes this.