Raible Designs

Tuesday April 25, 2006

CSS Framework Design Contest - only one week left! It's time for another CSS Framework Design Contest Update. The contest will officially end this weekend (Sunday night), but hopefully people will continue to contribute designs after that. After the initial deadline passes, I'll send out a vote to the AppFuse CSS Mailing List. If you have a better idea of how to handle voting, I'm all ears. Maybe we should use JIRA?

I spent a few late nights last week converting some of Andreas Viklund's Templates to use the CSS Framework. All the ones I converted, along with many other contest entries, can be seen at http://css.appfuse.org/themes. For many of these, I've replaced the default forms.css with one that has CSS from Wufoo.com. If you'd like to include a similar form in your entry, just copy the <form>s from form.html into your own page.

I've also looked at incorporating the CSS Table Gallery, but found many of the designs to be pretty ugly. Nevertheless, most of them work with the displaytag, so I might include some of them in the future. In the meantime, if you want to see what they look like, go to css.appfuse.org/users.html (user/pass: mraible/tomcat). Change the "css" parameter in the URL to match a table's stylesheet, and you should see what it looks like.

To answer a few questions I received earlier today:

Does an entry have to contain all possibilities/layouts?

No. I've come to realize that it's easier to only accomodate one layout. If users really like your design, hopefully they'll morph it to a different layout sometime in the future. If you look at the Andreas themes I converted, they only have a main page and a form. They'll likely be enhanced in the future for form elements, calendars, tables, etc. - but that should be pretty easy (and I'm willing to do that work).

Am I "allowed" to overwrite some settings in the different layout CSS for different settings, depending on which layout css is used beside the layout according stuff? For example settings (appearance, design) for the main navigation and so on?

Yes. You can change any of the CSS files you like. The only thing that needs to remain constant is the HTML - and then only the ids and order of <div>s, etc. needs to be the same. The general idea we're hoping for is to put your "theme" in a directory and then refer to it dynamically as part of the showcase. We're in the process of enhancing the showcase site to use the same HTML pages for all themes.

Don't forget about the prizes: an iPod (60GB), an iPod (30GB) and a 2GB Nano. In addition, you could use your cool new design for the CSS Reboot. Posted in The Web at Apr 25 2006, 05:18:18 PM MDT 3 Comments