Thread: Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Panel / Menu (Page 2)

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On 29 Aug 2004, at 21:21, Mike Noyes wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-08-29 at 12:29, Shaun Murray wrote:
>> On 29 Aug 2004, at 19:07, Mike Noyes wrote:
>>>
>>>         http://phpwebsite-comm.sourceforge.net/temp/
>>>
>>> Any comments and/or suggestions are welcome.
>>
>> That works although I don't see why you hang everything off a div, 
>> it's
>> unnecessary and introduces an arbitrary structure into a document that
>> need not be there.
>
> Shawn,
> I think you missed the global div styles for menuman. Extending menuman
> styles to use variants (vertical, horizontal, tabbed, rollover, etc.)
> required the double class. At least that was the only reasonable
> solution I found.
>

Nope, I didn't.

You can still have <ul class="menuman horizontal"> if you want. It 
makes more sense than using divs to me most of the time although it may 
not fit in with getting it to work easily with phpWebSite.

I also wonder what happens when you've got multiple templates? eg. 
Announce has a view_small.tpl and a view.tpl which both have menus in. 
Do you define two classes so that each template view can be styled 
differently? Using the module name wouldn't let you have two different 
menu styles defined so I guess you'd have to use a content variable as 
the class?

>> Instead of
>>
>> <div class="menuman horizontal">
>> <ul>
>>    ...
>> </ul>
>> </div>
>>
>> Just use
>>
>> <ul class="horizontal">
>> ...
>> </ul>
>>
>> then in the css define
>>
>> .horizontal ul { ... }
>
> A global class name of 'horizontal' isn't very descriptive, and can
> easily cause a conflict that is resolved improperly. I believe
> specificity is very important when dealing with multiple stylesheets in
> this proposal.
>

I agree, but I'm trying to make them non-module-specific. I want to 
avoid having to define a 'horizontal' class for every module. It should 
be defined just once and work through all modules unless the theme 
designer has chosen to override them specifically for a module by 
building in an extra style sheet for the theme or module.

I really think we should avoid as much as possible multiple 
spreadsheets. I really, really, really don't want the default behaviour 
to be that module developers have to provide a stylesheet by default. 
The problem with that is that you're then setting a precedent that the 
style is set locally in the module and not globally by default so each 
module developer will set their styles up differently to each other. 
Whereas that's powerful, it's also hard work for a theme designer, site 
maintainer and prone to errors. It's a lot of duplication too.

I think that means there should be...

.horizontal ul {
	list-style-type: none;
	display: inline;
	margin-left: 0;
	padding-left: 0;
}
.horizontal li {
	display: inline;
	padding-left: 0.5em;
	padding-right: 0.5em;
}

...in the persistent style sheet which provides a basic menu. It's then 
overridden in the theme's stylesheet which is loaded after the 
persistent style sheet. if you want it more fancy.

eg.

.horizontal li {
	display: inline;
	background-color: gray;
	padding-left: 0.5em;
	padding-right: 0.5em;
}

And if you want it different just in a module then you stick it in the 
module's stylesheet and stick a module class in the template also, 
probably in a div surrounding the whole shebang though it need not be.

eg.

.menuman .horizontal ul { ... }

That gives you basic functionality with no theme stylesheet and no 
module stylesheets - ie. just one stylesheet. It's then easily 
overridden for different media, like print or PDAs.

"horizontal" isn't a very good gobal classname, no. I just used yours 
so you knew what I meant. I think you might have persistent and 
preferred the wrong way round also as preferred.css looked more like a 
persistent to me. ;-)

With menus, I think it's something that should be as global as the 
boxstyles templates so that you can style menus in one place and they 
get used everywhere. If you want something special for a module then 
they can have your own module menustyles although I imagine if they are 
nice enough, they'd make their way into the global menustyles.

>> If you want special treatment in a particular mod, then enclose the
>> content in a <div class="menuman"> </div> in the template, and the
>> mod's stylesheet will cascade the specifics.
>
> I'm still learning things about cascade, so I might well be wrong.

Who isn't? I spent ages last week designing some css only to find I 
couldn't get it to work on Internet Explorer again. Most annoying. Then 
came across a new css hack I'd not seen before. CSS isn't simple so we 
have a duty to make it as simple as possible.

I'm messing around with different menu styles at the moment, showing 
what can be done with a simple unordered list and working out menu 
states and if you need other classes. I think you need an 'active' 
class and a 'first' or 'last' class at least. It might get more complex 
with multi-level too. I was hoping to have this finished a while ago 
but paying work got in the way.

http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk/examples/pwsmenu/

The html is exactly the same on each variant bar a class name for the 
ul, only the css changes.
It's not then too much of a stretch to imagine a php function 
generating the html from a template when passed an array and a menu 
template name. The html is in /templates along with lists and 
img_gallery. I think perhaps boxstyles should be in /templates also if 
we're tying the whole thing up..

Shaun
aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk

Thread: Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Panel / Menu (Page 2)

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