Site design theme editor - PHP Classes blog

Contents

* Site design theme editor
* Upcoming features
* Your improvement suggestions

* Manning publisher sponsors the Innovation Award

Before the actual subject of this article, just a brief announcement that Manning publisher is the newest sponsor of the PHP Programming Innovation Award. They will be providing as award prize a book of choice of the award winners. They have several PHP book titles, namely of the "In Action" series.

http://www.manning.com/

By the way, if you would like to review recent PHP books of Manning and other publishers listed in this page and publish the review in the PHPClasses site, feel free to send a message to info at phpclasses.org, so the publisher is contacted to send you a review copy for free. The only requirement is that the review is published in English in less than 2 months after receiving the books.

* Site design theme editor

As it was mentioned in last month post, the PHPClasses site will be making possible for any user to propose new designs for the site. There will be a contest to let other users vote on the best design proposal. The winner will earn prizes and fame.

http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/80-9th-anniversary-annou ...

Therefore, it was created a new site design facility that lets you start editing the current site design or create a new design from scratch. A beta version of the site design editor is available here:

http://www.phpclasses.org/design.html

Once you go to that page, you need to create your own design theme proposal by giving it a title and a short name. The title will be used in theme listings. The short name will be used to create a directory that will contain your theme files, so it must start with a lower case letter and be followed by letters and digits.

http://files.phpclasses.org/graphics/create_design_theme.gif

After a theme is created, you can start editing the theme files. The editor adds two files to your theme to define the main page HTML and the main CSS files.

http://files.phpclasses.org/graphics/theme_files.gif

When you click on the link to edit the files, a text editor appears to let you change the file contents.

http://files.phpclasses.org/graphics/edit_theme_file.gif

These files are templates. The files have special marks delimited by curly brackets { } that define special points that the site template engine will replace by HTML or other values defined when the pages are generated.

Some of these template marks are mandatory. They must be kept in the files. You can rearrange them as it pleases you, but they must not be removed.

The main HTML template defines only the HTML that will go inside the pages <body> tag. This template must have a special mark named {body}. It defines the position that delimits the header and footer of the site pages. What is before that mark will appear in the header. The remaining will go to the pages' footer.

When the files are saved the site updates a preview area that appears below the file editor form. It shows how a typical page will look up with using the current theme files.

You may adjust the size of the preview area in a separate tab to see how the page looks like in different resolutions. There are options to switch between predefined resolutions like 800x600, 1024x768, or 100% of the current browser window width, or even a arbitrary resolution.

http://files.phpclasses.org/graphics/theme_preview_resolutio ...

* Upcoming features

This is just the initial version of the site theme editor. Future versions will include improvements that allow adding graphic files to let the theme designers decorate the site pages.

The editor will also allow the designer to choose in a separate tab between different types of pages that are rendered in the preview area. Currently it renders only an empty page just with the header and footer.

There will be also another tab with an explanation of each of the template marks, as well with the information of which are mandatory and which are optional.

Some features may need to be configured in a different way that does not require editing templates. For instance, some designers may want to put the navigation menus on the side, instead of showing it horizontally on the top. For that kind of details, the site may provide a separate form with specific options.

* Your improvement suggestions

Now, all of you that are interested in proposing new design themes for the site, should try the theme editor.

http://www.phpclasses.org/design.html

I am sure that once you try it, some of you will have ideas to improve it. In that case, please follow up to this article and post your comments.

Also, as mentioned in the last article, there is already a discussion thread going on about what features you would like to change in the site design if you could. It is recommended that you look there and give your opinions.

http://www.phpclasses.org/discuss/topic/site/forum/design/th ...

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Site design theme editor - PHP Classes blog

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