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[4.0] The Creation of AkoBluePortal |
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Written by Arthur Konze
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Saturday, 24 May 2003 |
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While I worked on my new template called AkoBluePortal I made some kind of development diary. I made a screenshot on every stage the template was in and wrote a small text about my steps. This is the result of it all. Maybe it is helpfull for some of you, who are planing to do their own templates.
 | Most of my templates start with a basic idea. I wanted to create a template which is based on the existing portal templates I released, but this time I wanted to use blue as the main color. Also the template should be a fixed width one because all the others were variable width. So I started in drawing a simple preview with a grafic program (I use Paintshop Pro for most operations). After I did this small sketch, I added a shadow to this preview. This looked so good, I decided to integrate the shadow to the template. |  | After a first preview sketch is done, I start coding the templates technical outline in HTML. It's just some kind of skeleton without any content elements. I do this by coding directly into a html text editor (I use Uli Meybohm's wonderfull Proton). Doing this with grafical html editor like frontpage or dreamweaver produces to much unwanted overhead. |  | The next step is porting the design skeleton to Mambo. I use the text editor here too. The Mambo PHP code parts are set into the right place in the preview. Then I check the result on a small Apache test server (I prefer Uniform Server, because it's small). When everything in Mambo works fine with the new template, I put it on the site for public testing. |  | Now that basic design and functionality are there, the finetuning of the new template starts. I normaly start with the grafic parts of the template. This means I shade color areas, create dividers for the button bar, design a test logo and add new arrows for lists. This is some kind of tryout phase for me where I test different colors and shade styles. |  | When the grafics are done, I start working on the Cascading Style Sheets. All colors are changed to fit to the templates main color sheme. Then I check the other elements. In most cases the don't need to be changed because the templates have similar settings. I also use Proton for this phase, because it supports lots of syntax highlighting including css. |  | The last step is a final test of it all and some small extras here and there. This time I added a nice grafic for the announcements. Also the "Search", the "Top of page" and the "Powered by MOS" found their final place in the theme now. For the testing I use Mamboportal.com. Testing on a live site is essential! The only thing left is compiling a final zip file and releasing it all... |
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