Colors… er colours are easily changed as described in earlier posts in this section. If you have the Firebug plugin installed it really simpifys things as you just click on your target area right in your browser and you can identify the id or class that needs the change, and then test a new color in real time.

I would open a tab with your old 4xx skin and another tab with your 5xx template you are working on and jump back and forth with Firebug getting color information from the old, and then editing the new.

P.S. Don’t worry about spelling colors like that. My Canadian friends spell it goofy too *ducking*

Hi Lee that’s great I’ll have a play with that tomorrow, what a useful plug in. They’re not all bad those Canadians after all 🙂

but colors is the proper American English way!

at one point, we had a mix of the two English spellings of multiple words as Andy is from UK… so we opened a ticket to correct and decided whoever did the ticket would get to chose…  after a month or so, I finally did the ticket and picked my English

as Lee says, creating another overlay is really simple… While not a fair comparison, I was creating a new overlay in an hour or two…  just start with one of the current overlays and update the limited number of styles (compared to the theme stylesheet that is)… 

I think there is still a spColorVariants.txt file in the overlays directory which ‘tries’ to tell you which of the overlay sections are used for what… unfortunately, it might not be up to date, but should get you close…

there is a new (perhaps not finished) overlay called desert haze…  similar to tan..

It is quite similar but far too orange

I have started to use it as the basis for a custom overlay and I am getting there. However I have had to overwrite late-summer because merely saving it in the overlay folder under another name does not make it appear in the list. So I figure that I have to add the file name somewhere, is it default/styles/spOverlays.txt by any chance?

My theme is nearly there but I can’t figure out where certain elements are coming from despite using firebug. All part of the learning curve.

Conrad

no, its goes in spTheme.txt in the main theme directory… there is a list of supported overlays…

the spOverlays.txt just tells you where all the various options are used in the main stylesheet…

I’ve got it, quite like my first attempt.

http://g0ruz.com/ABF_Test/forum/

You’ll need to log in with the credentials that I sent you via email. I call it conrad-tan, original eh?

good work. see not that hard!

Indeed it wasn’t and actually it’s really shown me the advantage of the approach used in V5!

Conrad

cool. thanks!

From what I could see looked really nice! And looks great with your WP template. Nice work, you’re leaps and bounds ahead of me. I haven’t been able to touch my template for at least a week.

Thanks for the kind words Lee. I used firebug as recommended by you, copied a lot of the structured tan skin and then used my eyes.

Now I have to solve the WP theme incompatibility issues. The theme is called wasteland and has not been maintained as the author has gone on to do other things. There are definitely a number of issues with the theme.

Conrad

Sadly, of course, out-dated themes are a common problem. Out-dated plugins as well come to that.
As I have repeatedly said, plugins and themes are one of WP’s great strengths but can also be a great weakness.

And it’s driving me mad! I think that the problem is comments.php for the theme but for a rookie it is not an easy thing to solve.

I have thought about learning how to write my own theme but it just seems staggeringly difficult at this stage. I really like the look of the wasteland theme as well