Two years ago phpList got a new look with the Trevelin theme. One year ago it became enabled by default on new installations. Trevelin brought features like touch screen support, responsive design, and widget-based dashboard.
Community feedback shows some users still use the older Dressprow theme. For phpList developers, maintaining two shipped themes is hard and duplicates the time it takes to test new features, RCs, and releases. Managing dependencies on, and updates to, libraries like jQuery is also significant work.
Therefore dropping support the for Dressprow theme is being considered. What would this mean? Dressprow could still be installed manually, and improvements submitted via GitHub, but it would not be included in future releases of phpList. Community testing during the RC phase of releases could still take place, but the rest of the release process managed by phpList Ltd would test only using the Trevelin theme. Its likely that Dressprow would become unusable over time if nobody stepped forward to keep it up to date and maintained.
Community feedback
In order to decide whether this is the best direction to go we really need your feedback! Below there is a poll to indicate which themes you currently use.
Please reply to this topic if you use Dressprow, indicating why it’s better for you or how Trevelin could fill the gap. Other theme-related feedback is also appreciated (we can split this into separate topics if necessary).
I wanted to alert you that files in ui/dressprow are referenced in the phplistapp.js file as well as the view/campaigns.tpl.php file in the Manage Campaigns plugin. Not sure about other plugins that I do not use. So it may be necessary to add the relevant files from dressprow into the trevelin folders.
The thing I like about Dressprow (and why I still use it) is that the menus expand when clicking on the mouse.
The reason I don’t use Trevelin is that each time you click on a menu item, everything shifts around on the menu, and it’s ‘extra work’ to figure out which menu is clicked, which menu I want, and where that item is… if the menus were at the top, that would be better.
Dressprow has been around for quite some years now and since last year Trevellin is the default theme in an attempt to have a fresh interface. As you can read on this blogpost
“Maintaining both themes has proven quite a challenge; every aspect of phpList’s interface must be tested for each release twice over, once for each theme, in order to catch issues — particularly those relating to JavaScript.”
Mariana, thank you very much. I followed your advice and went to look for the theme “dressprow” in the github repository; However, I installed it manually and I realized that it was not working properly. Doing a little inspection in the messages that the development console throws, I noticed that both the all.min.css style and the javascript all.min.js found in the repository are not correct, so I went to recovery my backup files of version 3.4.5 of phpList, manually copied the files to the directories where they should be in “dressprow” theme and this solved the whole problem. I hope you can verify this detail in the github “dressprow” theme repository for the rest of the people who like this theme and they will not find the same difficulty that I had.
