Interview With Mike Creuzer (AKA Audentio)

The Sandman

Well-known member
Yeah, we're at it again - we've just published our latest Interview with Mike Creuzer (AKA Audentio).

Here's a sample:
Describe your current UI.X framework. What makes it different from other styles, and what makes it a "framework"?
The idea behind UI.X was simple: Strip out everything from the default skin that makes the skin look like, well, XenForo. I was seeing a lot of themes that just looked too close to the default. People were keeping the same fonts, font sizes, the same borders and border-radius', etc. and my least favorite of all: the gradient images. So all I did at first was go through the entire style property system and replace all the fonts, border-radius', spacing in between elements, images, everything and stored them in variables or just stripped them out. By storing many property values in variables, you can then be able to literally change anything you want simply and quickly in one area rather than going through all the CSS and all the style properties.

I then continued to build other unique things that I hadn't seen elsewhere. Rounded avatars, a fixed navigation, different navigation positions and styles, the ability to move the sidebar from the default position right to the left, toggleable sidebar and node categories, and more. One of the main features it became known for was the side-by-side nodes. The credit for the idea goes to someone who used to be on my design team, and would still be if he wasn't in school. The side-by-side nodes was in one of our original products, Quark. We eventually recoded Quark from scratch when XenForo 1.2 was released and took the idea for side-by-side nodes and placed it into the framework so that you can make any theme of ours have this functionality. We are even adding side-by-side categories in the next version now and continue to add more features whenever we can. We also pride ourselves on optimizing the code using XenForo's conditional system so no extra code is ever being loaded if you aren't using the feature.

UI.X is a framework and should be treated as such for these reasons. It allows the webmaster to have the design look how he or she wants it to look without a huge amount of advanced CSS experience. All UI.X does it take advantage of what XenForo has built in, and there are no plugins required for using it. It is a well organized, easy to edit, modern system and we like to think that absolutely any design can be ported to it with only a few changes to the style properties (and perhaps some extra CSS as well). It also serves as a great way to make sure your design is easily upgraded. Let us handle the upgrade of UI.X for you, your sub-skin should have very little, if anything at all, to manually upgrade.

I could talk all day about UI.X; we really put our heart and souls into the project. We have been working on it for the best of 6 months if not more. Almost every day as well. If we aren't working on custom work, we are working on UI.X, that much is pretty much a constant.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top Bottom