Ishimaru-Design

I come here to announce you that after two months, I could finally finish the phpBB3 styles updates !

This wasn't the work on the styles that was so long to do, but the accumulated tasks I had to do : I was literally overloaded !


Regarding the PNG issue under Firefox 3.6

I didn't have time to tell you about this, but after I posted an article on my French blog, those who commented told me about image optimization and gave me a link to an optimization tool.  By testing this tool, my pics lost weight and at the same time, it definitely solved the color issue since this tool removes all unnecessary color profile information and so, removes the ones that cause issues.

For graphics designers that might be interested, I give you this link to optimize your pics : http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/

Then I learned to use little more GIF format and indexed PNGs for non-transparent pics that have a few colors.

This site, the portfolio and the blog all had this diet.


An insane load of tasks !

In addition to the styles updates, I had other tasks, and the biggest one was to finish the first chapters of my GIMP French lesson in order to send them to validation on Le Site du Zéro, and this took me almost the whole month of June to do this blitz, so those who are waiting for a while can finally read them.  The fact that I would like to upgrade my Ubuntu had something to do with it since there are much changes between 9.04 and 10.04's visuals.

When I could finally send my tutorial to validation, I could finally breathe a bit and feel that I finally managed to get over this load of work !

Regarding the Pro_Ubuntu variants request for Terraburg, it finally unblocked, but I first had to finish correcting the vanilla pro_ubuntu style so I can apply these fixes on the style that's installed on his board.  Now that update is done, I can finally begin to make the variants.

After the phpBB3 styles, I still have other platforms styles to update, and the next ones will be the ForuMotion skins.


Changes in phpBB3 styles

The style changes are important enough to motivate me to increment the second number in each style's version number.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the changes :

• [*] Optimized all pics.  The non-transparent backgrounds have been switched from RVB to indexed color mode, and all pics have been processed with SmushIt in order to remove all unnecessary color profile infos.  The most alert of you might notice that all archives have lost weight.
  
• [*] Fixed a text/background contrast issue on hover links in posts : The text and the background had the same color, so the text was completely hidden.
  
• [*] Fixed wrong extensions of some pics.  For some bugs, it came from the "Online" icon, and for other, it was the report button in imageset.cfg file.
  
• [*] Removed code duplicates that appeared during the update from 3.0.6 to 3.0.7.
  
• [*] In Pro_Ubuntu style, the PNG forum and topic status folders are back.  Since I changed PNG fix script for DD_BelatedPNG that uses VML instead of AlphaImageLoader and that doesn't require any HTML code addition everywhere, no bug has been reported in the other styles that have PNG folders and use this script to fix them.  So the risk to see horrible pizels on icons' edges is over !

All styles are compatible with phpBB 3.0.7-PL1

If you use one of our styles, it is strongly recommended to download the newest version.  If you heavily modified them, comparison tools exist to help you.  Some compare directories recursively, some other don't.

If you use Windows, I recommend you WinMerge, a graphical file comparison tool that can compare two directories recursively.

If you use Linux, I only know the hdiff Perl script that can compare recursively each code of each file in each directory.  As soon as I'll upgrade my blog to Wordpress 3.0, I'll settle an English version of my blog and I'll translate the article I just published on my French blog.

With that, you'll be able to update your styles without losing your modifications.