Themes - Part 1

Live from CSDC this is the 3rd post from dallas, there's even more pictures in the picture for CSDC on my site.

Ben is talking about the Theming method in CS. Talking about what it all does, and more.  Mostly about Cameleon Controls.

Talking about the types of Cameleon Controls, lists, value, form, condition, action, pager, utility controls.

Most of Cameleon Controls supports the ContentTemplate, some support the display conditions, for forms, there is a query override tag in the Control.

Actions controls are used to do something after a form is submitted.

Forms have a SuccessAction control in it, which define what the control dodes when there's a success action.   Usually this redirects the user to the referralurl.  If there's not (returnurl) referallurl, it'll drop down to the next successaction, which redirects to the homepage usually.

The pager controls, which I know how to use, but you may not, is lots of examples, postbackpager, callbackpager, scrollingpager, or the standard pager.  All of which work slightly different, but work with every list control.  It's really quite cool, and Ben, on getben.com has some cool examples of this.

All controls that could make a link, usually do, but they don't use navigateurl, they use LinkTo, which renders a link, wrapping the content, say some text, with a link.

The ThemeImage referenses a Theme Image, as the control's name tells you, but it uses ~/ for the Theme path, not the Root path, which is useful.

Utility controls, with are mostly the stuff with Theme at the beginning, but they include all of the controls that doesn't match the other control types. 

I know how to do mostly all of what Ben has been talking about from just playing around with Cameleon.

If you  want to know more about theming visit [url]http://docs.communityserver.org[/url], losts of stuff there, and there's more stuff at ben's site, which is on [url]http://getben.com[/url]

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Tips

Now, this is how I do it, and I recomend you use it too.  Don't use the SDK, just use a web project to open the community server installation, via FTP, or File, or more.  Which is cool, it's how I do it, via FTP.  Makes life so much easier, you get intellisense, FTP takes a while to get going as it has to load the dll's, which can take some time.  Properties aren't usually listed on there, but there's a huge list on [url]http://docs.comunityserver.org[/url]

Use XHTML!!

I Strongly recomend using XHTML, it's so much nicer, and it'll work much  better in most browser, I know IE is the exception.

Another tip is to generate a mockup, use XHTML, photoshop, and more, make the HTML page look as you want it, using CSS and little images, then, copy the Default theme, or simple theme, and customize it to that html page.  Now, I do this, find it soo much easier for making Athena, and more.  Just copy and replace the code mainly in the master.master page in the common folder.

This is actually how I made Athena, wasn't how I made Athena 2.0, but Athena 2007 basically started out from there.

If you know how to use ASP.net Evals' and Databindings, you can use that too.

Now athena, doesn't use any ASP.net Eval's, but it uses a basic ASP.net Hyperlink as the basis of the Athena Personalize hyperlink, and then ASP.net's Client script references to populate the javascript into the page, so much easier.

I strongly recomend learning cameleon, as it's great, and extens ASP.net's standard controls beautifully.