css questions

[Steve Wood]

1- Is the only way to access the Web Style Builder from within the Properties of an individual Component? Seems should be a menu option somewhere.

2-Is there any way to assign a css to an A5W page that has no components? E.g.: text only A5W pages.

3-I have made chagnes to a css and on publishing (after clearing the cache) it seems to be inconsistently affecting different pages. For example, I rendered the TeaCup css to have a transparent background (from the gif that was assigned). Some of my published screens show the new background, some do not. Similarly, the source for some published pages show a embedded css codes, some do not.

How can I get a handle on this? I find good documentation on how to use the style sheets, but not how to implement css across the board.

[Steve Wood]

More info - I can tell the css file is not getting updated on publishing. For testing, I made obvious changes to the css file (ruby red background, etc.). I can see it in my Web Control Panel Preview, but on publishing, neither the css list nor the screen format has changed. The published source includes a line for "link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/TeaCup/style.css"" followed by a css list, but does not include my changes.

[JerryBrightbill]

Steve

Any good web design program like Dreamweaver can build and edit css files. However, because of the way Alpha css files are built, you can also edit them from within the program as you have learned.

The inconsistant behaviour you are seeing is probably because there are css files in a number of locations. The originals exist in the A5V6 program folders. When you publish, these are copied to the publish location in a folder named css under the publish location. If you look at the source code on any page using a component, you will see a temporary line that always loads the original css for livepreview.

However, you can have your own versions of the css file in a folder under the web projects folder and publish that to the final location when you publish. For example, under the web projects folder I am using for any given project, I have folders for css, javascript, and images. I place the css files, javascript, and any images in those folders. Any page can now refernce those files with relative references like href="css/corporate/style.css". The trick comes when I run live preview. Since these may not exist in the same location relative to the page in Livepreview, I manually create similar folders under the LivePreview folder and copy the files there. The only trick is keeping the files synchronized in both locations. Whenever I edit one, I also save the file in the other location.

Jerry

[Steve Wood]

Thanks Jerry - I can see how this works now. Changes I make to a css from a component are reflected in my Program Files\A5V6\CSS folder. Then on publish they update files on the webroot\project\css folder. Why they were not updating before, I'm not sure. But they are now. I also had some A5W pages referenceing AlphaSports rather than my favorite TeaCup.

[oldtony]

This is very confusing. I see CSS folder with the same files in v6, v7, v8, & v9. for a recent web page i had to ftp the css folder to the web server. Then all worked great. i simply put the css folder in the a5Webroot.
On the other hand, the localhost server will not use the css settings. i have the web pages in a subfolder. To run the webpages i enter http://subfolder/index.a5w. The web pages work fine but the css settings nerver show up. They do on the real server. I have copied the css folder all over the local a5Webroot & subfolders with the same result, No style sheets. It would be nice to see the webpages using the css setting before publishing on the production system.
thanks for any suggestions.

[Steve Wood]

Just ensure the folder structure (as far as the css folder is concerned) is the same on the localhost as on your server. I normally right-click on the css folder as viewed in Alpha and select publish.

[narmada]

Can you do rounded corners and dropped shadows using CSS? If so, what is the easiest way of doing this? Please help, Im na newbie starting to learn web design.

[Steve Wood]

Yes, if you browse the web you can find instructions on making rounded borders either using images, css alone or css + javascript. But you are starting at the hard end of CSS. If rounded corners are an absolute must, it may be good place to start the education, otherwise I'd start with learning basic CSS.

[kyleim]

Steve or Others,

I have changed the local css definitions on a grid with style "news" and added ".newsdatatd a","newsdata a:hover",and ".newsdatatd a:visited" since I want to control the link color. When I preview my grid the changes to the css are only partially reflected in the normal and working previews, and not at all in the live preview. Any idea why this would be happening?

Thanks