I have to design a form for a wordpress plugin.
This plugin will be used on multiple websites. My doubt was how will I be able to make the
form design as generic as possible so that it will fit well and blend well with the wordpress theme's design. Since the form could be placed in the page, post or the widget area.
I also need to consider that most WordPress themes are now "responsive" to reflect the increasing viewing of websites on mobile devices.
I would like to know your opinion on this topic.
Thanks in Advance.
This is a actually a good question, but on the other hand it is a bit broad because you need to consider a lot of things , and as for now, the details supplied by you are very limited.
First , I will assume that the form will be on the front-side of the site .
In order to achieve best - compatibility , IMHO, you will need to :
1 - Simplify the HTML as possible, but at the same time..
2 - Use all the required standard elements ( and also HTML5 support )
3 - do not directly apply any CSS ( see below )
4 - Make sure it is responsive as for the DIV order
5 - Make an easy targeted unique class
6 - If you must specify width / height, make conditionals for widget...
In my experience, the more minimal the code is , the better it "adapts" itself to the theme.
The fact is , that most themes already do ( or should ) include styles for the most common form elements , such as button, input-fields etc. ( because of the comments form, and also well- it is required).
you can also pick up the sample data which has form elements and read also the theme testing process. so if you will stick to those classes and elements ( for example those of the comment form ) you will be fine in most cases . All this is under conditional - because you did not really specify what kind of form you need and how complicated it is .
as for point 3 :
There are several approaches .
make a number of well designed generic "form themes" that the user
can choose but one option to..
leave an empty css and a place to embed own css In settings.
Create a complete set of CSS IDs and classes, with applied rules from
a color picker for example
combination of all of the above
All of this answer can be summed to one word "flexibility" .
You need to think of letting the users the maximum flexibility possible , but at the same time supply them with the right TOOLS to achieve it.
Related
I have a joomla site and would like to integrate some old unfinished webcomics to it, so I can pick them up where I stopped in a CMS that won't leave me in an absolute frothing rage (thanks, wordpress).
I've got some experience with Joomla and I believe it would be a pretty good platform for managing multiple comics... except for the small issue of horrid navigation between pages/articles. Joomla's integrated article navigation is a humble but passable start, but if you intend to use categories to organize chapters then getting from the end of one to the beginning of the next is... yeah. This is a pity, as Joomla's category and article management options are beautiful for archiving and presentation, and adding gantry 5 to it means a great deal of control over the reading experience. Basically, joomla has pretty much everything I want, except for the navigation.
Ideally, what I'd like to be able to accomplish for comic navigation in joomla is:
Clickable full-article-image leading to next article/page
Prev/next article buttons (already available)
Prev/next category buttons (do we have those?)
The latter two in a module I can choose where to publish (optional)
And this is it, basically. I understand that implementing the first could be very hard without some major template customization, in which case I'd be willing to insert the image as a link in the article body... but only if there was one single code I could use, like the one that generates the next category article button. Because I'm not willing to create hundreds of menu items to generate links page-by-page.
So is any of this doable?
This is a quick answer but too much for a comment. I'm assuming since you are on SO that you don't mind coding (as opposed to just configuring).
I think you need to do two things. First you need to create a pagination.php for your template. This will let you really super control what the pagination looks like. You can have images, special css and js, whatever you want. You can also add the "last" and "first" options.
I think you need to make a new plugin to replace the core pagenavigation plugin and that also generates the previous/next category links. (Or I guess you could make one just to do categorynavigation depending on what you want.) HOWEVER, it seems to me that there is data on the sibling links that is already being generated in the content category model so you might be able to use that. (Check the code; I think there was never a UI for it, but it is there. Even if it isn't there, siblings are very easy to obtain in nested sets)
The other thing you can really think about if you go that route is changing the whole thing somewhat to use a module that gets the current ID and category ID from JInput. You might also be able to use JPagination. The important thing, however is that you make sure to do the caching the way the pagination that is there does it. In other words you really want to cache the whole list in the order you want so you are not running so many queries and slowing your site down. You may want to look at the categories and category modules to get some ideas about the queries to do.
Hope that gets you started, but it is definitely something you can do without too much trouble.
Thymeleaf puts a large emphasis on "natural templating", which means that all templates are already valid XHTML files. I always thought that is a great step forward that I can generate fragments in my templates e.g. in JSP I'd write
<tagfile:layout title="MyPageTitle">
<jsp:body>
Main content goes here
</jsp:body>
</tagfile:layout>
My "Layout"-Tagfile contains all the header-tags (title, link to stylesheets,...), the menu and justs inserts title text and body at the right point. I don't need to know anything about stylesheets menus or the like when designing my html fragement.
This is in contrast to the idea of Thymeleaf which encourages me to create full html pages (including a sample menu and all the headers). While the manual of Thymeleaf continues to emphasise how great this is, it never deals with duplication of code concerns:
I have one template that generates a menu and all my other templates (could be many) include a copy&pasted dummy menu just so that I can view the template in a browser without the server side generation mechanism. If I have 100 templates that means that prossibly the exact same dummy menu exists 100x (in each and every template). If I change the look of the menu it's not done with creating a new dummy menu, but I need to copy&paste the new dummy menu into 100 templates.
Even if I decide to do something as simple as renaming my CSS file I need to touch all my templates as well.
There is always the danger that my template looks just fine in my browser, but the generated output is broken because... well... I broke it (could be as simple as a misspelled variable name). Thus I will need to test the output with the actual generation anyway.
Did I misunderstand something there? Or is this indeed a trade-off? How do you minimize the impact of code duplication?
Natural Templates are just an option in Thymeleaf. As you can read here http://www.thymeleaf.org/layouts.html there are many options, including a hierarchical layout approach like the one you seem to prefer (I recommend you to have a look at the Layout Dialect).
However, Natural Templates are the preferred and most explained layout option because Thymeleaf was thought from the ground up to allow you to do static prototyping (in contrast to most other template engines). But it doesn't force you to.
So.. how are Natural Templates applied in the real world to avoid code duplication becoming an issue? That depends on the scenario, but one pattern we see repeated a lot is people creating full document, natural templates for 3-4 or maybe even a dozen of their application's templates, only those that are more likely to take a part in the design process --exchanged with designers, with customers...--, and simply not apply that header and footer duplication in the rest of the application's templates, making their creation and maintenance much simpler.
That way you can have the best of both worlds: a means to exchange fully displayable pages between programmers, designers and customers for the pages that this is really relevant; and also a reduced amount of duplicated code.
What's more, thanks to libraries like Thymol (referenced in the article linked above) you can even avoid code duplication completely, allowing your fragments to be dynamically inserted via JavaScript when you open your templates directly in your browser without running the application.
Hope this helps.
Disclaimer, per StackOverflow rules: I'm thymeleaf's author.
I've created an alternative layout for one of my articles which can be applied successfully, but as has been highlighted in various forums: if you view the article using the Single Article menu type the alternative layout doesn't get applied because of an XML override.
I have a Joomla site that is setup for Sales and Support where the article info such as date, hits etc is useful but on the marketing side none of that is needed, hence an alternative layout would work well.
I want to know how to enable my alternative layout using the Single Article menu type - I've already got the layout how I want it (testing it by having it overwrite default.php) but want to set it up as marketing.php instead and only have it applied to what is needed.
You're probably not going to like this answer because you have already written you're alternate view. If you were rewriting it to begin with, why would you not write in a way that the side bar parameters (date, hits, ect) are within a container that is only loaded conditionally. This way you would only have one view to worry about and a lot less headaches.
I have to convert a static site for a client and it has to retain the exisiting layout.
Fortunately, most of the pages don't have to be editable, so for those I was going to use more or less the existing html.
The challenge I am having is that for many of the pages that do need to be editable, the content is laid out in columns (2, 3 and sometimes mixed)
This ( http://globalstrategies.org/index.php/give/hope-partners ) is an example of a page like that, and you can see others on the site where the layout is relatively complex.
I had thought of creating a jce stylesheet that would at least layout the page in the editor in a reasonable way (a bit like a responsive site, by having the columns stacked one after the other) , but I am concerned that my client may accidentally delete the surrounding classes/divs that create the more detailed structure.
I'm pretty familiar with Joomla and have built quite a few sites, but I've not used an cck tools and was hoping not to have to do that in this case, though maybe now is the time to learn.
Any advice / recommendations would be welcome !
Richard
Maybe ContentBuilder could do in your case, it's fairly easy and creates super-simple code, I've accomplished similar tasks with it. You provide the user with 3 fields (one per column) and create a layout for its display.
Another alternative is possibly even easier: you could override the use of the page functions in a template override of com_content/article, instruct the user to insert at most 2 page breaks, and use the page breaks to build the layout as you require.
If your sites is upgraded to the Joomla 3 you can use the build-in Bootsrap to do the layout.
You can find some more information how you can achieve this in the following page:
http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/scaffolding.html#gridSystem
I am building a module, or component not sure yet, but I need to have a some options that depend on another option. For example, if you choose "A" then options 1, 2 and 3 appear. If you choose "B" then 4,5 and 6 appear.
I can make everything appear at once just sending in the but can I make some params only appear after another is chosen?
Thank you.
This should be reasonably simple to achieve using javascript (i.e. it will run on the user's PC without a round-trip back to the server).
Put all the controls on the form, but for the ones that you do not wish to display initially use the CSS attribute {display:none} and they won't show.
Then use the onclick() event of the control which will determine whether other controls are made visible to show / hide controls as you wish.
There is an example of something similar to this (not within Joomla, but there is no reason (that I can think of) why this won't also work fine within a Joomla module / component) here: http://www.java2s.com/Code/JavaScript/Development/Makebuttoncontrolvisibleorinvisible.htm