First, your themes are very, very nice. The idea with the Genesis framework is clever. I want to make two feature requests where I feel Drupal is very weak. First, RTL. I know it's been requested, but I want to second the request. Unfortunately, I cannot use Genesis or Newswire (which is awesome) because I need to support Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew. For people like me, and there are many, it's a must have feature. Second, mobile support. Drupal lacks here greatly. The available mobile themes are not up to standard. Could you possibly make the subthemes mobile compatible? You are already using XHTML so half the battle is over...I think. I am not a theming god, you are. This is just my two cents. Thanks for all your work, you have really created some very cool themes that render perfectly on just about every browser I could think of. Very nice.

cheers,

wim

Comments

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented
Assigned: Unassigned » Jeff Burnz

RTL is coming. I have committed the first RTL stylesheet so that is in the current dev download. It's looking good in Fx but no good in IE. I'll get there with it, its all a learning curve for me as well (RTL) so I have been studying the Tendu and Garland themes to see how they get it all right. The principals are simple, its the execution that takes a bit of time to get right.

Regarding mobile, well not sure about this. You probably realise that mobile is not well supported for a reason... its a very site specific thing and could simply mean a lot of redundancy in the theme that not many users want or can take advantage of. I am interested in mobile web, of course, but I suspect I have been playing a waiting game with it to see how the technology pans out. Right now its just crazy - over 200 mobile browsers (impossible to support all of them) so the options are down to "support Opera Mini, Safari (iphone) and push plain text to the rest". At least, thats as far as I can tell. I'll keep an open mind to it, frankly my knowledge is a little out of date.

Thanks for the positive and encouraging feedback, its nice to hear people appreciate your work and find it useful. Cheers!

battochir’s picture

battochir commented

Thanks for the update. I'll download current dev and play with the RTL stylesheets. With mobile, I know exactly what you mean. Personally, I think your idea of "support Opera Mini, Safari (iphone) and push plain text to the rest" is right on. What's wrong with plain text on a phone anyway? With your subthemes, I personally would be extremely grateful with that. Keeps dowloading costs on a per page basis down by keeping design and presentation very simple AND you can do alot with just HTML/XHTML on such a small screen. I personally think that accessibility is more important at this stage in mobile than what's pretty. As for "Thanks for the positive and encouraging feedback, its nice to hear people appreciate your work and find it useful.", you deserve all the kudos you get and more. It's obvious you have put ALOT of thought and effort into Genesis and your other themes. You took the initiative and ran with it and built a very cool framework AND then shared it. I thank you for it and I appreciate your work. It's extremely useful.

cheers,

wim

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

I have found a pretty major issue with IE and RTL, and this one looks real hard to support/fix/wordaround etc. I'm still working on it but in short, what happens in IE is that both sidebars end up on the right. Its hard to tell exactly whats going on, but its a real nasty bugger.

At first I didnt really notice (shame on me) because I'm working all with white backgrounds and the position relative on the blocks makes most blocks "appear" as though they are correctly aligning over to the left, but they are not, and some blocks trigger the bug full on and the left col ends up underneath the right col (litterly hidden by it overlaying it).

This sounds easy to fix eh? But no... not after 6 hours with this have I come up with something that will work.

Seriously, if I can't get this to work I'm going to consider ripping all the layouts out and replicate them with the Border Politics method and see if we get somewhere.

Better news is that I have been able to build-in RTL sidebar flipping support for all layouts but it only works really well in Firefox (thus far only tested in Firefox and IE6/7).

IE sux. I havent said that for a very long long time, but this time, yea, it really does suck.

EDIT: Wow, I went and read my favourite site (position is everything) and it gave me a few clues, upshot, I crafted a solution that very much looks like it will work, at this early stage I have it working in genesis_1 without sidebar flipping. WICKED!

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

Ok, I have very rudimentary pretty good support for IE working, all other A grade browsers its perfect thus far.

I am rather left with a dilemma here, which I would like feedback on.

1) Leave the RTL support in for most browsers, leaving IE with (virtually) no support for percentage/fluid layout (works fine in all other browsers)

2) Rip it all out and admit defeat to IE's insane rendering of percentage widths under certain conditions...

The bottom line is:

- works in all broswers with fixed widths (either ems or pixel widths)
- works in everything tested except IE with percentages, granted the page displays OK in IE, but if the browser is resized the layout jumps around and can break.
- Sidebar flipping works in all browers except IE, for now I have left this out since it really smashes IE to pieces.

So, what do the RTL people think - leave it in, or rip it out?

battochir’s picture

battochir commented

First, I thank you again for all your efforts. I visited your theme comparison site and saw that it's all working quite nicely. I assume the the current DEV has your IE support included, so I'll download it and pound on it awhile and report back.

Personally, I would'nt rip anything out. You have put together a very slick framework that works under ALL conditions on all A grade browsers using fixed width. That's important and a result of good work. I would'nt trash it just because IE has it's head up it's arse.

If anything, I would keep it in and find out what IEs' issue is. For example, Garland works perfectly and it's fluid width/jello mold. I've gone through the css and I think you might have a solution there. I'm going to fiddle with your DEV to see if anything clicks.

Ultimately, any serious themes will have to have RTL support. That's why drupal core FINALLY stuck it in. Just the sheer numbers of native Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian speakers prove the point. Besides, your themes deserve RTL support because they're so slick. They should be able to compete with other themes that offer RTL support, broadening your user base.

NEVER admit defeat to IE! Such a hokey browser only exists because Microsoft has an army of drones hacking on it. Last I saw, they had like 60,000 outstanding bugs/issues.

My suggestion - leave it in. You've done awesome work, don't trash it.

cheers,

wim

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

Thanks, appreciate the feedback.

Thing with Jello mold is that its not content source ordered like Genesis, which really complicates things - if you look at the Tendu theme you'll notice both the sidebars are above the content, with those sorts of layouts things are really easy to get right, which is why they take the approach that they have.

RTL has been rather somewhat backported into Genesis, I always had it in my mind to have it, but never thought IE7 would react so poorly under RTL/Bidi conditions, IE6 I wouldn't really give a rats arse about, but IE7 is very important IMO.

FYI - DEV does not currently have these features, I need to clean up the code and a bunch of other things, should be done later today, so I'll let you know when its ready.

There are hundreds of changes so I need a bit of time:)

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented
Title: RTL and mobile support » RTL support
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

I have to make the hard decision and rip it all out. Here are my reasons:

1) Sidebar flipping does not work in IE, at all. AFAIKT from hanging around some RTL discussions groups, this is pretty important. IMO I think its something that should be solved on a deeper level, i.e. by Drupal i18n features, not the theme.

2) Even without sidebar flipping support for IE is incomplete. I am left with releasing a fundamentally broken product. That is not something I want to do. I am aware that IE8 has serious issues with RTL, so things do not look like they're going to get better, possibly worse.

3) No theme can be all things to all users. I would prefer to re-focus on what the theme does well, and make it better. I see RTL as being a significant long term drain on development time and support resources. This is simply a reality as I only have so many hours per day to dedicate to the project.

Clearly there is a need for more robust support for RTL in Drupal themes. However, the challenges I experienced are significant, I learned a lot about Bidi/RTL design, and to my way of thinking, design needs to be RTL centric right from the start, for example the Tendu theme, which does this better than any theme in contrib right now - http://drupal.org/project/tendu

So, with that said I am going to mark this as wont fix.

battochir’s picture

battochir commented

I appreciate your explanation. Unfortunately, this is once again Microsoft and their crapware being a pissdrop in springwater. RTL is certainly far from easy and it would be a drain on your resources. I honestly find it a shame that a framework such as your yours with such nice themes suffers such a setback.

Now that RTL is decided, can I ask your thoughts on mobile support? Do you find this more/or as difficult than RTL support? I ask because that kind of support in a theme is also a killer feature.

I know you've busted your tail on RTL and I appreciate your efforts. As you said earlier in this thread, Microsoft really does suck.

cheers,

wim

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

Regarding mobile, its a big maybe at the moment. The first step is to figure out if there's actually anything I can deliver in a framework that would be useful.

Certainly a subtheme could be released that supports mobile, and thats probably the first step, to simply build a theme that supports mobile in order to see whats missing from the framework and then identify what could be back-ported in.

FYI, I have left the base-rtl.css file in the theme, this provides the basics for rtl support, but it comes with the caveat that it doesn't really work for IE and is not supported.

battochir’s picture

battochir commented

"The first step is to figure out if there's actually anything I can deliver in a framework that would be useful."-- Yo, Um...You already have...DOH! The Framework itself, which is pretty awesome. I've gone through ALL your contributed themes, including Newswire. All very nicely done and look great in all A grade browsers. Thanks for leaving in RTL. I'm gonna fiddle a bit. Would you be willing to take patches if I can pull the rabbit outta my hat?

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

Regarding patches, yes of course, really looking for rock solid support for IE7 is the thing, you'll find there are some really strange bugs that jump outta nowhere, like blocks suddenly appearing on the wrong side, weird margin top for some blocks, some lists not switching to RTL etc etc. I mean the list goes on. Really heartbreaking when it looks 100% perfect in Firefox and every other browser I tried (about 8 others).

BTW - Genesis will be updated tomorrow - its a HUGE update, massive changes to the inner workings of the framework and essentially turns into much more of a "framework".

Tomorrow I also start on the video tutorials (there's another thread going already about those) to help guide anyone to build their first subtheme.

Once I get some ideas about mobile stuff I'll start new thread.

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented
Status: Closed (won't fix) » Active

Ok, back on this again, I can't leave it alone, I HATE to be defeated by IE and I had a bit of a brain wave today and decided everything I was doing to combat IE was essentially wrong and there must be a simpler way...

HORAY, turns out there is!

Early days but it looks like I have this working in both layouts, WITH SIDEBAR FLIPPING!

LTR
left | center | right
center | left | right

RTL
right | center | left
right | left | center

The secret sauce turns to be 1) reverse the floats (rather than the negative margins as I was before) and 2) float the .inner divs in the same direction and 2) set a 10% offset using padding to push the sidebar inners back into position.

Dang nabbit I think I have IE beat:)

I'll update in a few days, if everything passes mustard I'll release a layout-rtl.css file for download (attached here) and get this into the next full version of Genesis. My hope are very high right now, very excited about this.

So far this method is showing to be bug free, except (you didnt think it was that easy did you?) for the caveat of not being about to use fluid widths over 95% ( a stupid scroll horizontal scroll bar appears, its because of the additional width added by the padding offsets).

But lets fact it, if you saw it before, this is out-of-site better.

FYI - if you want to test this out go here, click on Arabic in the language switcher - http://drupalstaging.com/starter-themes/node?theme=genesis_SUBTHEME

battochir’s picture

battochir commented

jmburnz--you're a freaking theme machine. I go away for a couple of days and you got the whole RTL deal solved. Kudos to you. I checked out the demo on the comparison website and it's looks awesome in IE 7. Can't wait to download it and play with it a bit. Congratulations...giving into to Microsoft crapware is always painful. Thanks for following through on this. Your themes are too slick for mere LTR.

cheers,

wim

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

So far so good actually, I have all the layouts flipping and mirrored correctly, I just need to do some more testing with various block layouts (before, certain block configurations would send IE7 mental...). Again, so far so good - everything looks very solid.

I still have one small caveat though, which at the moment I think is acceptable - if you use percentages (fluid width) you can only go up to 95% (thats for IE only, all others it perfect at any width), other than that, it all works.

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

During my development of the next evolution of Genesis I revisited RTL. After some thought on this matter I have decided that for now I will revert to #7 and remove support for RTL. The layout method is not well suited to RTL and there exists dedicated started themes for RTL and others that do it cleanly and without the major hacks required to make Genesis RTL work in Internet Explorer.

Here is a very short lists of themes that support RTL:

Tendu
Ninesixty