Forum OpenACS Q&A: design & presentation

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Posted by Ben Koot on
hi folks,

In my constant quest to find ways to brighten up the visual presentation of the toolkit I found this tutorial on the possibilities of CCS  http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/050/050.css&page=0 a great site with a whole bunch of templates. Does anybody have an idea how to write a short tutorial on how to use these kind of scripts in combination with the toolkit?

Thanks

Ben

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Posted by Andrei Popov on
Ben,

I don't think it is about scripting -- it is about structurally marking up the document that is being displayed, and then applying styling to resulting elements.

I also believe that we have a *very* long road ahead of us in that respect -- there is a lot of FONTing and TABLEing all over the kit.  Yet I also believe that a call for making it all a lot more standard has been put forward: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=134257

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Posted by xx xx on
Hi Ben,

The designs you mention are free to use as far as I know, but the images have copyright on them.
You cannot expect the designs to work with <master> and <include>, however. Given the 'positional flexibility' of CSS, I expect this to be hard if we don't restrict use of CSS or structure all content pages in a similar way.
Currently, I'm reusing the designs in a package, that will allow users to create homepages online depending on the segment/contract. I haven't seen problems occur with the designs besides the fact that not all browsers are CSS-compliant.

For a plain adp file you could do the following.
- download the csszengarden html- and css files of the design you like
- look in the css file for image names and create new images with exactly these names
- edit the html file by cutting out css-zengarden text and replacing it with text from your ADP file.
- save the html file with replaced text, to the ADP filename.
- put images, css file, adp/tcl file in the correct directories and set file permissions (chown/chmod)
That should work if I'm not mistaken. If you are not familiar with css or html use http://www.handleidinghtml.nl (dutch) as your guide.