History: UserPagechibaguy

I'm Gary ))Cunningham-Lee((, in Chiba, Japan.

I have Tiki running at our family web site (currently version 1.8) and the Phoenix Developer Consortium web site (version 1.7.4, but soon to be upgraded).

The Phoenix site uses a customized theme and index page, trying to reduce the "lots of boxes" CMS look. It basically retains the look that the site had before switching to Tiki. That site also has a "no-CSS" theme available to members, many of whom use behind-the-times Amiga/MorphOS browsers that don't support style sheets. I made alternative templates for most pages that (shudder) replace divs with tables and CSS styles with old-style HTML tags. After the site is upgraded to Tiki 1.8, I'll make the switch-themes module public, if anyone wants to go retro-surfing.

I also made a theme that basically replicates the style of one of our organizations partners, to maintain a consistent look for people going back and forth. This was interesting because it's a two-column page with a top horizontal navigation bar.

Around the holidays, the ))Cunningham-Lee(( site used a XOOPS theme, Dezina's xchrismus, that I adapted for Tiki. In the geo theme, I replaced the background "map" images to some that are more appropriate for the site — Japan on the upper left and the US west coast on the right. I haven't made the switch themes module public yet because I'm working on themes that aren't ready yet.

One ongoing mystery I've had is with the mose, geo, geo-light, and trollparty themes. In these themes, input text in textareas (such as when editing a wiki page) did not/does not show when I'm using my Sharp laptop (Windows XP - Japanese version). On no Tiki site does this text show. I thought (erroneously, demonstrating the danger of jumping to conclusions) that this was a quirk of the Japanese software. But on other computers running Japanese Windows, I didn't experience the problem. So why my computer only? Well, I have no idea.

Anyway, the "fix" for me is to delete "fixed," from the textarea description in the relevant style sheet files. This is actually an invalid (or at least undocumented) parameter for fonts in CSS, and no harm is done by the deletion. But it makes the text show up on my computer, so I'm happy.

I'm having fun converting themes and playing with original theme ideas. So far on my own site I've got "ports" of Chronicles, a texture-intense design by the same author as the Subsilver theme, as well as five or six other themes in progress. They are all quite different from the available Tiki themes; one thing I've been going for is variety. One theme, Sev Dravid, for example, uses a two-column page with Tiki's right column stacked under the left column.

In the forums here I described a problem I had when trying to update the database tables. Specifically, the tiki_comments table fix didn't work. I finally found a solution, which was to add a couple of missing columns to the old table just to avoid an abort (using phpMyAdmin).

Something else that just happened is that I added a blog rss module as a user module to show blog posts on the index page. First of all, the feed previously showed post dates rather than titles, but there's a "hack" to fix this also described in the forums here (well, you can also read it in my blog at my site).

Second, I had a major problem after adding the blog rss feed module: Tiki stopped displaying pages entirely. I think this may have been due to the missing "maximum=X" in the module data. Once I added that, everything started functioning properly again.

On the down side, Tiki still doesn't handle gif thumbnails right. I realize that my GD library doesn't write gifs, but why doesn't the alternative thumbnail upload work?

Also, while the forums to email gateway has come a long way, I'm still bothered by anonymous duplicate posts and the fact that emailed posts are indicated as From: <forum@domian.name> rather than the original author. Like other mailing list messages, these should be from the author and reply to the list, not from the list. Can I change that? I haven't found how yet.

But relatively few complaints. Tiki is an amazing tool that continues to improve. Thanks to everyone who is a part of it!