Free Templates

[erichss]

ANybody actually know of any sites that has free vShare templates?
I dont' mind paying for templates, but I would prefer to play around with a coulpe before buying one that I will stick with.

[grynmoors]

Playing with the templates that comes with vShare (since you already have that) is your best bet.

The main files to play with are:

header.tpl, footer.tpl, index.tpl, right.tpl, video.tpl, view_video.tpl, video.css and style.css

and of course the images.

Remember, the colors are throughout the template system and not just in these files which makes it difficult to skin, but not impossible. Dreamweaver with it's search function is a godsend for this. I open every .tpl and .css file, search for the color or code I want to change and make have Dreamweaver perform the function of changing colors/code. For instance if I want a black theme, I have it change all instances of #FFFFFF to #000000 (this is just an example).

It takes me a couple days to make skins and that's working like a dog with a bone. I'm working on a gaming site right now and it's taking me 2 days so far and I anticipate several more before getting it "just right". View the progress here: http://vshare-mods.com

[erichss]

Thanks

[EinfachClicken]

You can also accomplish that with any global search/replace programm that has the ability to recognize and work with multiple file extensions (such as .doc .tpl .php .css .html and so on) and subfolders at the same time. The only problem with what was said above, appears when modified templates share the same colors for text, textlinks and background ... where you might want changes between those too. But in that case you can always look for the specific .tpl file and then insert your own code changes right there, causing that to effectively by-pass the css files and/or the search/replace changes that had been made.
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[grynmoors]

Dreamweaver does it. Can search the files in a particular folder if you tell it to. Dreamweaver is awesome IMHO.

Tonight I went thru the templates and got rid of all the depreciated <font> tags and replaced them with <span> tags.

[EinfachClicken]

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Hmmm, I'm not sure if I understand the difference? If you want to change or add something that's font specific within the span tags, you'd still have to do that manually with the right code in that particular place, outside of the css. So why not just leave the font tags in place to begin with, if they're there already?

My thinking is this ... 10 years ago we were running a server that was based on a 486dx system with over 10.000 visitors per month and about 6000 files almost all of which had font tags. At that time server performance, file size, cpu speed, amount of memory, etc. were all major concerns in the industry. However, TODAY our server is about 60 times faster ... has about 40 times more ram ... with about 200 times more hard disk space, blah blah blah, yada yada yada, while the TEXT BASED CODE has remained pretty much the same. So, based on todays machines, why would anyone care if there are a few hundred (or even a few thousand for that matter) additional font tags which are all just text based anyway? I know that it has to do with the "clean code pages" but c'mon, this is one area (font tags) where I can't imagine that it would make any difference at all to remove them?

Man, I remember having to go out of my way with image dithering solutions and decisions as to where and when to use animated images, gif files, jpg files, photos, or plain graphics, just because speed was always a concern too. But today I don't even think about that stuff hardly anymore because just about nobody uses a modem anymore ... and with a dsl connection, darn near everything loads up fast, even images in excess of 75KB which I already consider to be quite hefty. And if images are of little to no concern, then any extra font tags within the code shouldn't be of any concern either .... ???
What am I missing?
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[grynmoors]

To each his own. There's not a lot of <font> tags in the templates, but I just like to clean things up where I can.

[bplex]

I guess it really is, "To each his own." For me, I'm actually in the process of changing updating all of my HTML as well. But the reason has nothing to do with file size or servers for that matter (as things used to be 10-11 years ago). Rather, it all has to do with standards.

Most people who are not web developers, per say, think that HTML is HTML. However, in the web development world, this is not the case. The current HTML standard is XHTML 1.0/1.1, which is NOT the same as HTML 4.01, which was the previous standard. In the XHTML specification, most of the HTML tags are written differently and many of the previous HTML tags that are widely used in 4.01 are depreciated in XHTML. For example:

HTML 4.01 Image Tag:

XHTML 1.0/1.1 Image Tag:

Example of depreciated tags:

HTML 4.01 Font Tag:

<font face="verdana" size="2">

XHTML 1.0/1.1 "Font" Tag:

<span style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px">

To be honest, following current web standards actually leads to larger files. However, following current web standards leads to fewer browser incompatibilities, which is the goal of XHTML. With browsers from all fronts moving towards better support for things such as XHTML, Ajax, etc, it will soon be upon us where having a site written in older standards will either be slower or not look the same. Even today I'm starting to see this happen (in which some websites look one way in one browser and different in another) more often.

[grynmoors]

Thanks for putting into words what I could not express.

[EinfachClicken]

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Just for the sake of discussion ... I completely disagree ... :wink:

Some things are meant to stay indefinitely and html code is one of those things!
Again, back to 1991 when I first started playing with html, there was no such thing as javascripting, php, java, js, flashfiles, and other things that came along later. HTML was first and that's undeniable. As a result of being the first type of code to be implemented for web pages, and still talking about the 90s, there were over 250 million web pages/sites Worldwide ... yup, in the 90s already! By the time that the year 2000 came around, now almost 10 years ago, html was as established as it was ever going to get, at that time with an estimated (news documentaries about the internet) 2 BILLION homepages worldwide, at least half of which were viable, professional sites with nothing but pure, free, public information ... information that was not likely to be presented differently (php, xhtml, etc.) for many years to come, if ever ....
Today, even today you can still find sites from as far back as the 90s with all html coding.
And it's exactly because of those hundreds of millions of pages worldwide that html will never actually be replaced.

Netscape tried ... and failed to standardize all web coding. Our sites used to receive in excess of 70% traffic, years ago, from netscape users. Today, we have about 78% of traffic from IE users and 6% from firefox users. The one thing that so many developers/programmers are just refusing to acknowledge, something that's been driving me nuts for quite a few years, is THE FACT that their bread and butter is being paid for by clients who expect traffic to their sites ... and those clients don't give a flying crap how much the developers love firefox. Those paying clients only care about hits by their visitors, and if the vast majority of hits are being generated by IE users, then those sites *MUST* first and foremost conform to those standards ... even if the developers don't like it.

But back to HTML, sorry about that ...
The sheer amount of old as well as new pages and sites simply prohibits any other code to actually replace html, and thus html is here to stay indefinitely. Most of the coding changes that are taking place don't even have a lot to with the "replacement" of html, but rather, are written to easier accommodate different code variables within one and the same file, such as javascript, php, html, and/or xhtml all at once. That's why you're seeing the changes that you're seeing. And as far as different looks on different pages/sites are concerned, 99% of that comes from the fact that a site is either created by a developer who dislikes IE thereby designing sites with tunnelvision, and/or people who design sites without the proper knowledge of how to make things look identical, regardless if IE6/7 or Firefox or Opera are being used, those currently being the 3 most widely used browsers in the world. According to our stats, only 0.4 % of our users are Netscape user anymore. I take great pride in the ability to be able to code darn near anything with html directly, or on the basis of html. And I'm not alone ... there are tens of thousands of dinosaurs like me out there, who make their pages and sites look perfect with all of the browsers, and it's because of people like us and the aforementioned numbers, that html is here to stay ... at least for the next 10 years or so.

Does this limit my abilities online? Absolutely, it certainly does!
But considering the fact that I do professional image design work, professional translations, basic perl/cgi, large scale web development (huge structures), professional desktop publishing, animation projects, advertising projects, site maintenance on a domain with 40.000+ files, computer repair, design, and building ... I simply don't have the time nor motivation to learn anything else ... because the wife, kid, and our dogs would like to have a piece of me as well.

Yeah, CDs are cool, but have you heard ... many artists are beginning to release vinyl again.
Yeah, xhtml is cool, but ....
That's my take on the html issue anyway. :D
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