This is a Tiki adaptation of the Planetfall theme originally done by rhuk for the Mambo CMS (now Joomla). This theme won mamboportal.com's competition held for that CMS; as a contest entrant, the theme was released under a GPL license, which makes it available for porting.

Tiki 7 information

Recommended module assignments (in this order):
Top: logo (nobox=y), login_box (nobox=y, mode=popup), menu (nobox=y, type=horiz, id=secondary_site_menu, class=secondary_site_menu)

Topbar: search (nobox=y), menu [main "tiki-top" horizontal menu] (nobox=y, id=tiki-top, type=horiz, css=y).

Tiki 5 information

Support for more features

For Tiki 5, Planetfall can be either the traditional fixed-width or a liquid layout that is the full width of the browser window. The Look and Feel switch controls this, as with other themes. The theme also now supports the secondary site menu, displaying it in the "silver" area at the top of the site header area. Tabs and other details are also more nicely done now.

Modernized construction

Previously, the Planetfall theme used a large table that spanned the full width and height of the browser window, putting every visible space into a table cell. To modernize the Tiki 5 version, the default tiki.tpl file was used instead, with just a simple table put into div id="middle" to contain the three columns of content. (A table is needed to provide full-height borders and background colors; this is possible with pure CSS, but arguably the CSS method is more kludgy than using a simple HTML table.

A generic version of this file (with the side and main columns in the standard positions) will be available soon if anyone wants to try this method for full-height column graphic treatments in a Tiki theme.

Simplified CSS

This version of the theme relies more on the rules in the default layout.css and design.css files, and its own CSS file is reduced quite a bit. If anyone notices some styling missing or different from previous versions and wants to reinstate it, try finding the CSS rule involved and adding it to the the site as custom CSS. For more information, post in the forum here.

Older information, which may no longer be relevant

The main difficulty with adapting the theme to Tiki has been to convert it from a fixed-width page design to the fluid-width design needed to display Tiki's variable-width content.

• I used the left-column background image for the drop-down menus, and used the page background image for the left column.
• I didn't look to see how Mambo handles the header image and header module. In this version, the module is in a floating div within the div that holds the header image.
• One of the main problems in porting a theme to Tiki is that this CMS tends to have a lot more features than the originating CMS, so choices have to be made about covering things that weren't in the original. That is, the sites that I saw using Mambo/Planetfall generally used non-Mambo components for blogs, galleries, forums, etc., so there is both a problem and opportunities in spreading the theme around to Tiki's additional features. For its part, Tiki tends to be over-specified with CSS identifiers, so a general descriptor in the original theme can be applied to a whole bunch of Tiki items en masse.

• Replacement of menu folder icons via CSS (doesn't work with Microsoft Internet Explorer). Original folder image deleted via a display: none, and the Planetfall black/white square background image, changed with CSS hover states, shows up twice in the mnu_application_menu, once for the flip and once for the section menu item - unplanned serendipity. Here's a normal menu:

h1 headline

h2 headline

h3 headline

h4 headline

A table	Row 1 Cell 2
Row 2 Cell 1	Row 2 Cell 2

A link

Code plugin:

<?php
  // Hello World in PHP
  echo 'Hello World!';
?>

Quote plugin:



Planetfall_customizing describes the layout of the logo graphics area.