I am currently working on a project that focuses on making themes for WebGUI. We are going to give the default templates an overhaul, and standardize all the classes. The goal is to be able to make a theme for a webgui site without needing to change anything in the templates.

I mentioned this in this discussion, and JT agreed and let me know he would accept it to the core.

The plan is this:

• remove all inline and head tag css from templates
• come up with a number of standard classes, which are used consistently in every template (like the "pagination" class, as it is used now)
• remove all table layout that is used for positioning
• replace template vars that are incorrect or not working (there are a few in the coll. system template)
• come up with a set of rules for templates of new contributions (see also Arjan Widlak's email on the devlist: "The policy for contributions to the WebGUI core")
• compliant with XHTML 1.0 strict, WCAG Priority 1, Section 508 (US) =~ Webrichtlijnen (NL)

I have a few questions:

1. What do y'all think of this?

2. Any more suggestions to add to the above list?

3. I have been looking at www.csszengarden.com for some ideas on the subject of designing css for existing html, because that is what making a theme for these new templates will be like. I'd love to hear some opinions on this. We don't want to be limited in our design possibilities, so how does one make html that doesn't restrict a designer (or as little as possible)?

Thanks, it's nice to see that you're on the same page on this.

I agree with the current goals and would only add, give us some ID's. I'm not specifically sure where but I'm sure we could discover where they are needed for both CSS and JavaScript.

Yes, very good, I'll add it to the list. I'm sure there's lots of places where an ID is preferred to a class.

I would be interested in creating some time to volunteer, especially in regards to planning, brainstorming and possibly locating unused variables.

That would be great, but I'll need to discuss this wil my colleagues and see if we can come up with some way of dividing tasks. We would like to set up something similar to the the community wiki, for templates only. We could make a (dynamic) set of rules, so that anyone can take an old template and revise it, and add new rules when needed.

patspam wrote:

I'd suggest you consider building your css with YUI reset/grids/fonts.css since they're clean and powerful and take care of a lot of cross-browser stuff (and YUI is already bundled with wG).

Patrick

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 12:17 AM, <rogier@unitedknowledge.nl> wrote:

rogier wrote:

Thanks, it's nice to see that you're on the same page on this.

I agree with the current goals and would only add, give us some ID's. I'm not specifically sure where but I'm sure we could discover where they are needed for both CSS and JavaScript.

Yes, very good, I'll add it to the list. I'm sure there's lots of places where an ID is preferred to a class.

I would be interested in creating some time to volunteer, especially in regards to planning, brainstorming and possibly locating unused variables.

That would be great, but I'll need to discuss this wil my colleagues and see if we can come up with some way of dividing tasks. We would like to set up something similar to the the community wiki, for templates only. We could make a (dynamic) set of rules, so that anyone can take an old template and revise it, and add new rules when needed.

http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/new-default-webgui-templates/2


--

Plain Black&#44; makers of WebGUI
http://plainblack.com

http://www.plainblack.com/webgui/dev/discuss/new-default-webgui-templates/3

--

Plain Black&#44; makers of WebGUI
http://plainblack.com

Update:

Looked at YUI css, which is nice but has some problems:

• The css does not validate. We'll contact the YUI guys and see if we can do something about it.
  
• We're not sure if the grids.css works well with WebGUI, because of the structure of the style and layout templates and because of wobject focus. So we are going to test this first.
  

Q: Has anybody worked with the grids css in WebGUI before? If so, what were your findings?

Rogier | United Knowledge
www.unitedknowledge.nl · www.webgui-help.nl