CB add on templates

Hi All,

I was just wondering about the add-ons and their templates files and was wondering what everyone else's thoughts on them are.

I am of the opinion that they are not needed as everything is set in the CB template and the whole style should be the same for all add ons.

Taking for example the tabs on CB profiles:
The joomla template has the css being used across the site.
CB then sets its own tab styles so you have to a new template in CB.
But then each addon sets its own style so you have to have a template for each addon.

While I am sure some people use the templates so each addons tab has a different style, could I make a suggest that the default template should not set any font or background stuff. And that each tab should use a standard class name.

What I mean is the articles addon uses (.cbArticles .articlesHeader ) but the forum addon uses (.cbForums .forumsHeader) with them containing the same style declaration. This is the same for the rest of the styles.

My suggestion would be just have a standard name for all elements that all plugin developers should stick to when creating plugins for CB.

Thus reducing HTTP requests for what is essentially duplicate styles and images.
And with the images being individual files rather than all in one there is lots of requests going on per page load. Even if things get cached.

Just my opinion though.

Kind Regards

Mike

CB will always have its own styling independent of Joomlas. There's no rules saying a Joomla template has to use the same classes and styling. So pretty much no 2 Joomla templates are alike. For CB to rely on this would be a bad idea. I applied that same logic to my incubator projects because I wanted a unified look. All my projects are template-able so you can restyle them however you please. You can choose to use CB styling in your plugin or not, just review its template files and adjust classes/IDs and HTML structure as necessary.

Thank you for your thoughts.

I was just thinking out loud with my post

Every component is different and so they should be.
I was more just thinking of the CB plugins inheriting the CB style rather than having their own which then needs customising for every plugin.

For example each plugin's default template could just use the css selectors that are found in the CB provided templates thus giving you the unified look you are aiming for across all of CB.

Thanks for your explanation of why things are the way they are.

Mike

Yeah, that's something we'd like to address with CB 2.0 where a wider range of styling will be available so plugins won't have much need to make their own.