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Nathan
Help Moderator
USA
7664 Posts |
 Posted - 16 February 2004 : 05:34:16
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quote:
Originally posted by RichardKinser
If we decide to use an external style sheet (which would be preferable) how do we make it easy to edit? Right now we just have an option page in the Admin Options, but to be able to write to an external file, we would have to require the Scripting.FileSystemObject be available. So, that's not very feasible.
You should be able to use the Response object to set the outputing mime type of an ASP page to text/css.
Response.ContentType = "text/CSS"
Then use an asp page (style.asp?theme=x) which can talk to the database/XML whichever and grab the approprate colors. Then from the html end this can be treated as a *.css file.
<link href="style.asp?theme=x" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
The only problem I see with this is that the client will have a hard time determining if the style content has changed. It might end up downloading with every request (which defeats the purpose of an external style sheet) or it may not download when the colors do change. In the latter case the query string may come into play where you have a property ("theme=x") that gets incremented whenever the admin changes any colors thus forcing all clients to redownload the css.
I know some ASP.NET guys are doing it that way.
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 Nathan Bales
CoreBoard | Active Users Download |
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robbear7
Junior Member
106 Posts |
Posted - 28 February 2004 : 14:37:58
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quote:
If we decide to use an external style sheet (which would be preferable) how do we make it easy to edit? Right now we just have an option page in the Admin Options, but to be able to write to an external file, we would have to require the Scripting.FileSystemObject be available. So, that's not very feasible.
If you look at the other very popular forums out there you'll find they allow the user to edit the CSS file directly. I believe firmly that users of snitz would be able to edit a CSS file directly without much problem. This is proven with the huge success of other forums that do the same. This could solve the issue of having to include a dynamic style sheet.
Theming the site using CSS could be accomplished using simpler javascript methods loading the correct CSS using cookies (Oatmeal raisin is my favorite). This would also allow you to just use single classes for an element and avoid browser issues using the mentioned multiple classes for an element.
quote:
I thought Robbear7 had Snitz pretty well CSS'd, but if I remember right there was an issue with some of the ways it was done. I don't know...
The only issue I know of is my CSS'd snitz forum was not updated to the newest release. It is perfectly useable and functional as well as browser compliant dating back to version 4 browsers. A great example of the CSS'd snitz forum can be found at http://www.dhtmlcentral.com/forums/ . You can view the CSS used at http://www.dhtmlcentral.com/forums/snitz_css.css .
Overall I totally agree that Snitz needs to utilize CSS and could be very easily incorporated. :) |
http://www.r7designer.com
Free Dreamweaver Templates and loads of help for CSS, XHTML and Web Standards. |
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stuF
Average Member
United Kingdom
561 Posts |
Posted - 05 March 2004 : 06:45:33
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| i think snitz should stay as it is, the whole joy of snitz for me is taking it from the standard design, and changing the way it looks at works through hours of hard work and coding. If you put everything in the downloads, all the mods available and a shiny new GUI you start to take that individual involvment out of the process. Vbulletin and PHPBB and all those others all well and good, but i like to think of snitz as the developers little secret, we can let the big organisations go on paying over the odds for thier out of the box forum software, personally, me and my clients would prefer a bespoke solution, made in the form of a fully customised snitz. |
Edited by - stuF on 05 March 2004 06:50:31 |
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wii
Free ASP Hosts Moderator
Denmark
2632 Posts |
Posted - 05 March 2004 : 07:12:56
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| Well said - I think it´s fun to design a forum so it looks completely different than standard, but this is also possible with phpbb and invision though. |
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