Theme examples

Allen

Please add a screen shot photo of a homepage, cat page, each style, etc. to
each theme example page. You only show what a Smugmug style gallery
looks like.
http://themes.smugmug.com/Basic/Black-Arts/1097710_RRzqK#51154513_Gsg3j

Andy

But isn't it super easy to just use the Themes Button on your homepage? By choosing a theme, we actually show you a preview in situ, and you have to actually choose it to make it save.

WinsomeWorks

Andy wrote: »

But isn't it super easy to just use the Themes Button on your homepage? By choosing a theme, we actually show you a preview in situ, and you have to actually choose it to make it save.

No-- I completely understand what Allen is wanting, because the themes behave differently on different pages. In other words, when you're customizing, it would be so nice to see what each theme looks like once you actually have a few galleries in the category, or if you do or don't have sub-categories, etc. Some themes end up doing some weird stuff on a cat page that they don't do on the homepage or in a gallery; know what I mean?

For instance, I was trying to use a theme on some cat pages-- I think it was Carbonite or one of the gradients. Looks great in a gallery. But then on a cat page, it gets a column going down the middle. You can't see this preview anywhere beforehand, and if you have certain customizations going (such as the one that removes those un-wanted columns) you want to know ahead of time which categories to add them to. There are other reasons too; that's just one example. Another one is that some themes put titles or breadcrumb trails within their border (or not), which changes their look & yours, so you don't want to have to click through a bunch of them to figure this out. You'd like to compare them ahead & see which will work.

Andy

WinsomeWorks wrote: »

know what I mean?

No, I don't. Go to your category page when logged in and click the themes button, apply Carbonite - you'll see exactly how it looks on your site on your page.

BigRed

Andy wrote: »

No, I don't. Go to your category page when logged in and click the themes button, apply Carbonite - you'll see exactly how it looks on your site on your page.

One problem with this approach is that so many of us have built customizations for our current theme that might distort our evaluation of other themes.

Also, having "vanilla" screenshots of themes might help with both designing and debugging customizations.

Maybe, rather than creating a bunch of screenshots (which admittedly would be a challenge to keep current), it would be possible to offer a basic vanilla (uncustomized) demo site that we could simulate the choice of different themes on (without an option to save the changes)?

Andy

You can do this now Just make a new gallery, put in any category you don't currently use (or just make a new category called "TestingThemes" or some such - then play around to your heart's content - making the galleries unlisted means nobody will ever see it but you