Monday 12 January 2004 8:05:58 am

Mark, thanks for your support!

Let me make use of your offer, and use this channel to ask you a couple of questions... If you would prefer me to contact you privately please let me know how at cc_asap@yahoo.com and I will clear out of this forum.

You say:

> The corporate site tries to use CSS for all layout - I
> initially tried to stick with this but couldn't achieve
> what I wanted (in fact even the standard coprorate
> site didn't seem to display correctly IE6/XP). I then
> checked ez.no site itself and noted it used tables.
> [snip] I hacked that to use tables instead of CSS.

:) I love it... I went as far as buying sitepoint.com's excellent book on replacing tables with CSS, as well as every other book I could find in the local B&N on the subject... But I am stuck... Any hints on how to start mixing tables in templates? Do you just use something like Dreamweaver? I assume you stay away from fixed-measure tables?

> soon realised there were hard-coded references to
> 'corporate' in some of the templates.

Same here. I just decided to keep the site called "Corporate" :) The URLs suffer, but hey, they are not perfect in a Non-Virtual Host setup to start with...

> I got the impression you shouldn't change core.css > so I only modified my own kdrec.css file and that
> seems to be fine. There's a lot in there you don't
> really need (it seems!).

After training myself on CSS, I actually *like* core.css. The problem I had with modifying was two-fold:
* Why hasn't the override mechanism extend to CSS? It would seem logical, specially considering how CSS works.
* Every time I edit core.css I have to brute-force write it to the cache, because my cache is eternal: nothing kills it :) Did that happen to you too, when you tried to replace graphics that came with the template, such as the logo?

> It is also still rather a movable feast and you can
> see look and feel things being stored tentatively in
> the database - I just steered clear of these as they
> seem a bit of a kludge just now.

That was one of my key questions, thanks for bringing it up... Two of the most misterious behaviors I have encountered are:

1. My admin interface puts out alerts about me having modified the site.ini file off-line for values contained in the "Look and Feel" section. In retrospect, that is a COOL piece of functionality, but...

2. All of the sudden, copies of my pagelayout.tpl showed up in their respective directories "deprecated" and renamed #pagelayout.tpl#... (?!)

1. and 2. above started me thinking that perhaps the ONLY way to modify the templates was through the interface... just to find out that the key site templates are NOT reachable through it...

Can I assume from your comment that you do all editing on .tpl, .css directly on the file system? Is that true of .ini files as well? and finally:
Do you store the graphic files of your look and feel as content? (I seem to understand that you don't, but I want to make sure...)

Thanks a lot for taking the time to support this newbie. I immensely appreciate it

Cheers
ck