[pmwiki-users] Suggestions

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 09:43:03AM -0500, Ben Wilson wrote:
> In terms of learning skin production, I suggest looking at several of
> the existing skins to see how others do it. While essentially a skin
> is nothing more than a single HTML page with PmWiki "hooks" and CSS,
> prior examples are a good start.
> 
> As for learning design and some CSS, www.csszengarden.com/ is a great
> place to go. The submissions are all based on remarking the exact same
> HTML page. This shows the power of CSS as well as some neat tricks.

I just want to add a short comment about csszengarden.com (based
on several offline conversations I've had about it with respect to
PmWiki).

First, I totally agree that csszengarden.com is incredibly cool
and has tons of neat CSS tricks.  But in some ways it's also misleading--
a large number of the designs there rely heavily on the fact that the
CSS template only has to deal with a single, static page.  

In PmWiki's case, where the content changes and even some layout items
change from one page to the next, many of the tricks used in
csszengarden.com don't apply.

Still, it's definitely a good site for inspiration.

Another site that I've found very useful for HTML and CSS
tricks is http://www.alistapart.com/ .

> As for designing your own, I would recommend first coding a very basic
> HTML structure sans CSS. You'll end up with a very unappealing page.
> Then, use CSS to shape the page (adding width and float to divs,
> etc.). Finally, add color, etc. I would suggest you be prepared to
> create two CSS stylesheets, one for media=screen and another for
> media=print.

I totally agree with this advice.  Whenever I'm working on a new
skin I'll generally start with a barebones structure and then build it
up from there.

P