css.appfuse.org
It's almost the end of March and we've only received a couple entries for the CSS Framework Design Contest. In an effort to show what contest entries look like, I've
developed and deployed an application to http://css.appfuse.org (login as an administrator with mraible/tomcat). This
application utilizes the CSS Framework and has a few themes packaged
with it. In addition, you can set it to use an external stylesheet to
make development easier. The default theme and selectable themes are pretty ugly right now, so don't get your hopes up. The good news is this is a work-in-progress, so hopefully it'll get better soon.
The theme setup I'd like to use in AppFuse relies on loading a
default.css from styles/themes/<theme name>. I've designated
styles/default.css as a place to import the css-framework files, as
well as specify rules for all themes. I'm open to alternative suggestions, but I think this is a good start.
I hope to evolve this application, along with the CSS Framework Design
submissions to show what's possible with CSS in web applications - as well as
provide a repository of downloadable themes. It's likely we won't ship the "CSS Selector" logic with AppFuse, but it should be easy to install one of these themes in your AppFuse-based application.
You'll notice that the themes currently available aren't working that
well. I'm working with the authors to see what I need to fix. It's
probably related to how I have things setup in the application.
One of the things I discovered in this exercise is that CoolMenus
isn't very CSS-friendly. It requires you modify JavaScript to change
its positioning. I've left the menu in
place for now, but I hope to replace it in the next few weeks with a
more CSS-friendly version.
Since we've only received two theme submissions for the CSS Design
Contest, I'm going to extend it to the end of April. Hopefully css.appfuse.org
will encourage more participation. Any thoughts, comments or bug reports are most welcome.