Developing the ultimate Gantry theme - any help appreciated
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- evilC
- Jr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 39
- Thanks: 0
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OK, so Gantry is great and all, but you need a decent template to really make use of it - so I am trying to make one.
What I would like to do is make one where you can set just about all the styling you want from the template manager. I'm talking about parameters for all positions for fore/background colour, background images with settings for repeating, multi-image repeats (eg top/middle/bottom) and underlying gradient for the html tag. Maybe borders too, but that would probably be on a later version.
All of these settings will be saved with the presets, giving you complete control at a per-preset or even per-menu-item level!
Obviously that's a lot of settings and in order to reduce screen clutter in the template manager and excessive entries in the presets I am developing a custom widget which will mean all the settings for each position should pretty much be part of one widget. Instead of storing each option as a parameter in the presets, the parameter instead holds the precompiled CSS. This means I need to code something to encode or decode css to variables.
I am not a professional coder, this is a labour of love - so I would appreciate any offers of help.
At the moment, I could do with help in the following areas:
1) Does anyone know of a code library to encode/decode css? Specifically one that knows the ins and outs of background images - the shorthand for that looks rather tricky (especially with multiple image tiles).
2) Any info on writing widgets would be great - I can find very little apart from the sparse documentation. I am doing OK so far (Got a compound widget with textboxes and colorchoosers that concatonate their contents on change to a master "compiled" box) but it is tough going.
3) I am also concerned about speed. Ultimately I would hope that template.css would be pretty much empty and I have already removed importing of style1-6.css, plus the css should be precompiled, so minimum logic would be required in styledeclaration.php - I am hoping that it won't be an issue. Any thoughts?
4) Legality. IANAL, but AFAIK Quasar's licence means that I can do what the hell I want as long as I release under the GPL also. Obviously I should not take code from paid RT templates, but I don't really see a need to. If anyone can confirm, that would be great.
Cheers all, peace out.
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