Creating personas (lightweight themes) for PMAO

[gracious1]

Noticed that PM Addons now has Personas. I want to create some personas (lightweight themes) for Pale Moon. Is there a tutorial or set of instructions on the size of the image and type (I assume JPEG), and how to upload to Pale Moon Addons?

Thanks.

[loxodont]

"It may be Phoebus 2.2 before personas become something users can submit."

- New Tobin Paradigm, see this thread: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=21601

The personas themselves are not much science.
You'll need two *.jpg images. On old AMO, for *legacy* personas they recommended a 3000x200 px 72 dpi header and a 3000x100 px footer standard for the Status Bar.
You can save some time if you don't place single objects like a pale moon, basilisk logo ... very near to the image margins. Depending on activated bars they can appear cut off in the browser or hidden by OS elements (like Minimize, Red X). It still happens to me that I don't let enough space to the upper and right image margins, then it doesn't look good in the browser and I spent another time to move things some pixels down.
I personally use jpg standard compression, non-progressive and not optimised (too smoothed sometimes). Choice of compression quality depends on image details. On high detail images I rather apply a value of 90 to avoid smearing or ugly lines in gradients, or around 80, if the image has more cloudy areas instead of fine details. (90 to 80 in the high quality range, some graphics programs handle this like in percent as 10 to 20)
On AMO you also had to define a text and accent colour, where the text colour is the more important one, because it means the GUI text on the bars, while only a few ppl knew what the accent colour was good for.
I don't know yet how this will look like in Phoebus 2.2 submissions.

[gracious1]

"It may be Phoebus 2.2 before personas become something users can submit."

- New Tobin Paradigm, see this thread: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=21601

Okay, thanks for the link. I look forward to this.

As far as defining a text and accent colour (at least for AMO), I assume that was in the accompanying text file?

[loxodont]

I read your Off-Topic thread afterwards... so they even removed personas from thunderbird.net

With "defining" text and accent colours on AMO I meant their submission form page with uploads for header and footer images, fields for name, description, tags ... and for those colours - think I missed "background" colour. Once the submission was done the images were stored on their servers and the new server location, user ID and all submitted information - also text colours - were put into that json file, which is more a config file and mere link or pointer to the separated online images. As it was said in O-T "as a service".
After reading about the ("old") personas removal in Off-Topic I checked a few of them in my list and to my surprise they still worked, so the images still seem to exist on the server.
With Personas Plus 1.8.2 and Lightweight Themes Manager 0.2.1.-signed.1let-fixed... I could even open the json files and find the images locations. But this may only help if you have saved the personas in Pale Moon or backup json files, that you can open with a json viewer. However, it would be time-consuming doing this for a dozen of images.

PS: If you want to make your own Personas both add-ons (LWT-Manager needs Personas Plus) are really usefull for testing and local use.

[FranklinDM]

There's a guide available at the Developer Wiki for creating personas/lightweight themes:
http://developer.palemoon.org/Add-ons:Themes/Persona

[gracious1]

There's a guide available at the Developer Wiki for creating personas/lightweight themes:
http://developer.palemoon.org/Add-ons:Themes/Persona

Thanks! Maybe this will answer some of the questions I had on the OT thread?

[riiis]

While waiting for PMAO to accept personas, in the meanwhile, you can create your own lightweight themes/personas using either ThemeTool or Theme Maker. Just enter your persona's "Background color" (i.e. "accent color"), "Text color", and persona "Name" into the "Solid Color Theme" template. Then click the "Install Theme" button. (To open the "Solid Color Theme" template in ThemeTool, click ThemeTool options button in Add-ons Manager (or the "Light themes" menu item on the Pale Moon appmenu). Then click the menu button at the upper-right of the "Light themes" page. Then click the "My Themes" menu item.)

To add an image to your new persona, first make two (2) backups of your lightweight themes (Click the menu button at the upper-right of the "Light themes" page. Then click the "Backup..." menu item.) Then make a separate/standalone backup of your new persona (Click the "Save As..." button for your new persona on the "Light themes" page). Then replace the header link for your new persona, with the link address for your replacement image, in one of the two lightweight-themes backups. Replacement of the footer link is optional. If the footer link is not replaced, the footer/status bar background will be painted with the persona's "accent color". Save the edited backup file. Then use ThemeTool's "Restore" menu item to write the changed lightweight themes/personas to "about:config" ("lightweightThemes.usedThemes"). (Note, the backup files are json files. I use Notepad ++ with the JSTool plugin, to edit json files). Lightweight theme image files generally are hosted on external servers. Thus, your replacement image(s) should also be hosted on external servers.

Note that lightweight theme image files can also be hosted on your local storage devices, but doing so is not recommended (e.g. "headerURL": "file:///C:/Local/Personas/371844/header1.jpg"). Lightweight-theme json files containing such file references can be backed up using ThemeTool, but such backups cannot be restored using ThemeTool. Such personas also cannot be enabled/disabled in Add-ons Manager, only removed.

Code: Select all

{
  "id": "LT-#8bb3e3-#092040",
  "name": "Sample Theme: #8BB3E3/#092040",
  "headerURL": "http://addons.palemoon.org/datastore/personas/palemoon/header.png",
  "footerURL": "http://addons.palemoon.org/datastore/personas/palemoon/footer.png",
  "textcolor": "#092040",
  "accentcolor": "#8bb3e3"
}