Well the time is finally here, after 6months of putting together the new skin and testing it on a localhost installation we are ready to begin rolling it out on the live site.

I am going to make the changeover page by page, so this will be over a period of probably a week.

If you notice things looking a little strange when viewing a page, it is probably because I am editing the page, so please have a little patience while we make the changeover.

The reason I am making the skin changeover in stages is because last time we did an upgrade, Google dropped all of our links, so I want to try to minimise any potential problems with search engines by making the skin change over a period of a few days.

Skin Info:

The skin is pure CSS, XHTML compliant, it uses sIFR 3.0 for it's headings, is semantically coded, has text-resizing along with a special print view so that you can easily print out the content of an article.

Basically I've put into practice all of the information on the video tutorials over the past year or so.

Hopefully you should find it much easier to view the content of the site.

Thanks,

Lee

Could you change the style of unread messages so that the link is also bolded? It's easier to scan that way ...

OH, it also seems that if I've read the first message in a topic and someone replies, there's no indication that another reply has been added ...

a) If I click on the 'not read' link they are displayed in bold - can you double check this?

b) Is it displaying different to the original? - do you mean for bolding or something else?

Lee,
Nice work on the new skin! Only one thing to note - while the skin may be XHTML compliant, that doesn't mean that pages that use the skin are XHTML compliant. For example the Forum module you are using (and that I also use on my DNN site) is not XHTML compliant (a DNN Creative forum page is, for example, currently coming up with "234 validation errors when I tried to validate the HTML on W3C's validator!). I have found it frustrating to put in plenty of effort to get an XHTML compliant skin and then for non-compliant modules to undo it all!
As I say though, nice work nonetheless.
Eoghano

Thanks, yes I'm aware that the forum has compliance errors, so do any of the pages that use the news articles module and snowcovered rss feeds - you should find though when I get to the main tutorial pages that all of those are compliant.

If I get time, I will do a little more investigation into the 2 modules to see if I can get them compliant, but the vast majority of the site will be compliant.

Cheers,

Lee

I'm used to clicking on Active Topics to see what is new.  These used to be bolded if there was an unread message in the topic.  That's not the case now.

can you do me a favour and post a test message in a different forum? - I've just added the original css code using the web developer toolbar and it doesn't make any text bold for me with the original css in the active topics.

Like the new skin! Orange is so under-rated

he he cheers!

Hi Joe,

Try that out, the css was in there, but it appears as though the capitalization was wrong, I don't know if this came from the original module.css file and it happened to work because it was in quirks mode.

It has been very interesting delving into module.css files for styling, there is big chunks that you can cut out and put into shorthand - or even just non-compliant css.

On another note - Even though the news articles module is not compliant I changed the template from tables to css and this halved the amount of code. - I think the overall structure still is a table, but the internal template is now divs.

Most of the pages so far have been reduced in size by 30k!

Let me know if there are any other problems occurring, thanks,

Lee

Hello,

I noticed that when users were posting long links in the forum that they were causing an overflow in the skin, so if long urls are now posted they are given a horizontal scroll bar and the width of the skin remains the same.

The code for this if anyone is interested was:

.afpostbody a
{
display: block;
padding:10px 0 10px 0;
width: 490px;
    overflow: auto;
}


Thanks,

I think we are pretty much there. All of the pages have now been converted. I just have to do a few behind the scenes tweaks such as adjusting the css file to ensure compliance.

If you come across any problems let me know.

Thanks,

Looks good.