Actinic CSS

[Chrismarworth]

I have made a site based upon my own design, complete with custom style sheets. The majority of the site depends upon my design and style sheet but there are obviously some elements left which rely on the actinic.css. Some elements in my design are not displaying correctly because they are being affected by the Actinic style sheet.

Looking at the comments in these forums one approach to style sheets appears to be to modify the actinic.css striping out the unnecessary items and entering the custom items. This approach appeals to me as it neatly cleans up everything. Simple equals good!

First question is, have I understood correctly what has been discussed? The second question regards the actual location of the style sheet to be modified. Looking through the site there are style sheets in the site1 base folder, designpreview, previewHTML and siteHTML folders. I have a suspicion if I delete the last three sheets and modify the style sheet in the site1 base folder, the other style sheets will be generated when needed. Am I right? I really do not want to start experimenting if I am not on the right lines. I tend to tear my hair out and I don't have that much!

Any comments would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Chris.

[leehack]

If your stylesheet is referenced after the actinic stylesheet, there can be no clash, your styles will always take precedence as they will be the last loaded.

If you like simple why not just add your styles to the actinic stylesheet available from the drop down box in design view, just add it all at the bottom after the actinic offerings.

[Chrismarworth]

Thank you for your reply.

My style sheet is referenced after the actinic.css but I do have a display problem.

I made a basic design in Dreamweaverbased totally on css . I will have some pages such as the home page on my site that are independent of actinic. There are other pages that will be generated by actinic from the base page designed in Dreamweaver. In the left hand column I have a menu that is based on an unordered list and css turns this into boxes for buttons. The text in these boxes is smaller in the actinic generated pages compared to the original page.

I can get round it, I have made a separate custom css for the actinic pages and I can alter this. But this is to my mind a bodge.

At the moment the font size for the body tag in actinic is 11px. I have used 100% in my style sheet, for the ul I have used .9em as the font size and it would appear I am getting 90% of 11px. I can achieve the same sized button text in both layouts by altering the .9em to 1.00em in my modified style sheet. I find this untidy and would prefer a different approach. I feel a more elegant solution would be to have one style sheet for the whole of the actinic side of things, hence my query.

I cannot edit the style sheet from the drop down menu, I can insert a variable and insert a layout, but editing the code as you can do in Dreamweaver is not possible. Do I need to do something to make it editable?

Regards

Chris

[leehack]

My style sheet is referenced after the actinic.css but I do have a display problem.

Then you are not defining the styles you need or you are experiencing em inheritance issues.

I made a basic design in Dreamweaverbased totally on css . I will have some pages such as the home page on my site that are independent of actinic. There are other pages that will be generated by actinic from the base page designed in Dreamweaver. In the left hand column I have a menu that is based on an unordered list and css turns this into boxes for buttons. The text in these boxes is smaller in the actinic generated pages compared to the original page.

You said you like simple, then follow that idea through and create all pages in actinic, you will not get one person advise you to do what you currently are, listen to the experience would be my best bit of advice here.

I can get round it, I have made a separate custom css for the actinic pages and I can alter this. But this is to my mind a bodge.

At design stage, workarounds should be the very last resort, you are working against the software, not with it. Change your approach, will make for much better sleep at night.

At the moment the font size for the body tag in actinic is 11px. I have used 100% in my style sheet, for the ul I have used .9em as the font size and it would appear I am getting 90% of 11px. I can achieve the same sized button text in both layouts by altering the .9em to 1.00em in my modified style sheet. I find this untidy and would prefer a different approach. I feel a more elegant solution would be to have one style sheet for the whole of the actinic side of things, hence my query.

I agree, design one DW template, design one css file, link them together, store them in the site1 folder and register them as an external layout - i do this each an every day and i am yet to encounter a problem or see a site that could not come totally into actinic.

I cannot edit the style sheet from the drop down menu, I can insert a variable and insert a layout, but editing the code as you can do in Dreamweaver is not possible. Do I need to do something to make it editable?

The design tab in actinic, which is the ONLY place you should be adding/amending the actinic css file, unless you know where you are going in the design library, suffice to say both are in actinic and not DW anyway. UNLESS of course you might be trying to change the code in the top window, where it is the code window below you should be using.

[los_design]

Have you tried running your design with <!-- actinic.css--> and see the results?

Once you have done this, you can then modify inline with Actinic to your chosen styles without the need to bother little old actinic.css again.

HTH

[Chrismarworth]

Thank you for your reply.

I agree I have an inheritance issue, which I will resolve. I asked for advise on how to modify the Actinic style sheet as I do not want to have a solution that I see as a bodge.

I agree Actinic can be used to generate very good sites; you only have to look at those developed by Green Jersey to see how good they can be. However, most Actinic sites I have seen have the same feel, you know it is Actinic long before you see acatalog in the address. The Actinic feel is something I wanted to avoid and that would have taken me a very long time to achieve using Actinic alone. I am comfortable with Dreamweaver I have used it for years; I can alter certain pages and get the effect I want with minimal effort. I will continue to use it.

If there was a proper Actinic design manual things would be different, but there isn’t, cryptic does not describe Actinic's efforts. Getting information is rather like pulling teeth. If I had all the time in the world and thought I would use Actinic design on a regular basis I would learn to use it differently. But I do not have unlimited time and I will only use the design side occasionally. Speed of development is my main requirement.

I’ll take a snap shot of the site and have a go at modifying the actinic css file.

Thank you for your help.

Chris

[Chrismarworth]

Thank you Daren or the your reply I will try that.

Regards

Chris

[leehack]

Personally Chris i think you have totally missed the point here. If DW is your strength and you can do anything in that, then integrating with actinic is the easiest part of it all. You can then create 'non-actinic-looking' sites if you want. If you get a great design created, you add 4 or 5 variables from the actinic menu and that design is then incorporated into actinic. It works similarily to the DW template system, although it is much better as it adds the whole shop management package into the equation.

If you create a library of your section and product layouts, you the apply these by selecting from a drop down menu to the various areas, how can anything be easier than that? It's certainly much quicker than individually amending things. The key here is having the correct library designed in the first place IMO.

Most 'non-designer' site owners struggle with html and css, not actinic IMO.

[Chrismarworth]

Thanks, I have sorted it now.

Chris

[los_design]

Thanks, I have sorted it now.

Chris

care to elaborate...?

[Chrismarworth]

I amalgamated two style sheets.

I was using three style sheets my own, actinic and a conditional one, ideally I wanted only two; hence my query regarding the way the actinic style sheet was integrated into the site. In the end I decided to do what I originally thought of doing and that was to paste my own style sheet into actinic.css and remove the redundant entries. There was a little bit of Oh! Why did that happen? But problems were resolved and I now use two style sheets which was my intention.

The site displays correctly in FF, IE 6, 7, Opera I have yet to look at it on IE on a Mac, but I don’t expect problems (I can’t believe I said that).


Regards

Chris

[los_design]

The site displays correctly in FF, IE 6, 7, Opera I have yet to look at it on IE on a Mac, but I don’t expect problems (I can’t believe I said that).


Regards

Chris

You may live to regret that Chris

Well done mate. B.O.L.

[gabrielcrowe]

I have a solution:

http://www.basketballasylum.co.uk/acatalog/actinic.css

[leehack]

In stitches, classic.

[los_design]

PMSL

Post of the day thus far!