I run and actively develop a forum (which in itself runs on heavily modified SMF 1.1.16) - one feature I would like to add is the ability for the user to pick custom colours (say 2-4) from a widget in the corner of the page to customize the colours of the forum.
The HTML output of the forum is structured such that modifying the colours can be done with pure CSS, and I'm wondering what the right way to insert this CSS is.
The idea I had was that once the user saves their colour information, a piece of javascript would generate the necessary CSS and save it using HTML5 localStorage (probably using a polyfill library). Then, on $(document).ready(), we check for this CSS being present and if it is, we inject it into the page head.
Is this approach sensible? It's easy to develop, but will it result in a flicker of the usual styling (given that pages are rather heavyweight) before custom styling is applied?
If so, is there a better way to do this completely client-side? I would rather not involve the server if at all possible, but if I must I can just have the server generate CSS files for every user who saves custom styling.
What's the best approach?
I suggest you have a base style for the page first so that there won't be FOUC. Then, have your JS load the custom styles, parse it, and apply it to the page afterwards. You could do a "fade-in change" (like fade in the background etc) so the styles won't load like a snap.
You could also blank the page first, like set the body to display:none, before you load the styles, then after the styles are applied, remove the display:none
You also have to note that local storage has it's size limit. Don't load too much. Consider looking for the LZW compression in JS. It might help.
Related
I'm using CakePHP to build my site (if that matters). I have a TON of elements/modules each having their own file and fairly complicated CSS (in some cases).
Currently the CSS is in a massive single CSS file, but for sanity sake (and the below mentioned details), I would like to be able to keep the CSS in it's own respective file - ie css/modules/rotator.css. But with normal CSS, that would call a TON of CSS files.
So, I started looking into SASS or LESS per recommendation. But - it seems these are supposed to be compiled then uploaded. But in my case, each page is editable via the CMS, so a page might have 10 modules one minute, then after a CMS change it could have 20 or 5...etc. And I don't want to have to compile the CSS for every module if it's not going to use it.
Is there a way I can have a ton of CSS files that all compile on the fly?
Side note: I'd also like to allow the user to edit their own CSS for a page and/or module, which would then load after the default CSSs. Is this possible with SASS and/or LESS?
I don't need a complete walkthrough (though that would be awesome), but so far my searches have returned either things that are over my head related to Ruby on Rails (never used) or generic tutorials on each respective CSS language.
Any other recommendations welcome. I'm a complete SASS/LESS noob.
Clarified question:
How do I dynamically (server-side) combine multiple CSS files using LESS? (even a link to a resource that would get me on the right track is plenty!)
If you want to reduce the number of CSS files & you have one huge css file that has all the component css, just link to it on all pages & make sure you set cache headers properly.
They will load the file once and use it everywhere. The one pitfall is initial pageload time; if that's not an issue go with this solution. If it is an issue consider breaking down your compiled CSS files to a few main chunks (default.css, authoring.css, components.css eg.).
Don't bother trying to make a custom css for each collection of components, you will actually be shooting yourself in the foot by forcing users to re-download the same CSS reorganized in different ways.
Check out lessphp (http://leafo.net/lessphp/). It's a php implementation of less and can recompile changed files by comparing the timestamp.
Assuming that 'on the fly' means 'on pageload', that would likely be even slower than sending multiple files. What I would recommend is recompiling the stylesheets whenever a module is saved.
The issue of requiring only necessary modules should be solved by means of CMS. It has nothing to do with SASS or LESS.
If your CMS is aware of which modules current page has, do not run a SASS/LESS compilation (it will be painfully slow unless you implement caching which is not a trivial task). Instead, adjust your CMS's logic so that it includes each module's CSS file.
Advanced CMSs like Drupal not only automatically fetch only necessary CSS files, but also assemble them into a single file and compress it.
And if your CSS is not aware of which modules current page has (e. g. "modules" are simply HTML code that is saved into post body), then you can't really do anything.
UPD: As sequoia mcdowell says in his answer, making users download one large CSS file once is better than making them download a number of lesser CSS files that contain duplicate code. The cumulative size of all those smaller CSS files will turn out to be larger than the size of a full CSS file.
Im currently building a practice responsive website, what I am doing is taking an exising website, building it up using twitter bootsrap js and css, meaning it will be fully responsive for mobile.
The issue is that there are some large carousels and images on the site. Ideally I would like to just completely remove certain elements, like a carousel for instance, and instead have the options within the carousel as a standard list menu.
It seems the main option is display:none based on media queries, but I am starting to foresee that I will run into big problems for loading time if the entire desktop site is still going to be loaded on the mobile, only elements hidden.
Are there ways to completely exclude html based on browser size? If anyone has any good links or articles that would be great. Or even just opinions, on whether there is actually need to exclude html or not.
Thank you
First off it is really good to see that although you're talking about display:none; you actually still want to display the content without the bells and whistles of the image. Well done you.
The next thing I would look at is if you don't want to load images for a mobile then why are you adding it for the larger sites. If the image isn't providing a function, assisting in explaining the content better, then why not just drop it for the desktop size as well?
If in fact it does help tell a story then you can include the images and some of the popular image services like adaptive images, hiSRC, or PictureFill which will serve the mobile version of the image first and replace with a larger image at higher viewports (but remember, there's no bandwidth test).
Finally, if you do want to serve some different content, then take the advice of fire around including more content with ajax. The South Street toolbox from Filament group can help you out, pay particular attention to the AjaxInclude pattern (it also has a link to the picturefill).
You could consider storing heavy data JSON-encoded, and then creating elements and loading them on demand like so
var heavyImage = new Image();
heavyImage.src=imageList[id];
Then you can append image element to a desired block. From my experience with mobiles this is more robust than requesting <img> via AJAX, since AJAX could be pretty slow sometimes.
You may also 'prefetch' images with this method (like 2-3 adjacent to visible at the moment), thus improving UX.
You could pull in the heavy elements via AJAX so they wouldn't sit on the page initially, making it load faster. You could decide to do the AJAX call only if the screen size is larger than X.
If you want you can use visibility:hidden, or if you use jQuery you can use
$(element).remove() //to remove completely
$(element).hide() //to hide
$(element).fadeOut(1) //to fadeout
Background
I'm developing my own OOP content management system in PHP for fun and to expand my programmig knowledge
What I've got
I've got the main framework set up, users can login to the backend, add pages, edit pages, set up content in rows or columns, add logo's, billboards, etc.
Expantion
My next venture is to allow users to modify the style of their website through the panel. including header colours, font size, font family, etc
How to Implement
I thought of a number of ways to do this, but i wanted to ask the community to see if they can come up with a better solution or justify one of my solutions.
Idea 1:
I could write/find a php class that parses a css style sheet, and then re-writes it as the new style sheet with the editted values
Idea 2:
I could separate the existing style sheet into structure, colors, fonts, etc, and just allow the user to modify the colors and fots separately.
Idea 3:
I could ditch the whole separating style from content idea, and make php to write the user specified styles right into the html...
Information
Does anybody have any other methods they could think of?
If not which one of mine would work best/be most efficient/optimal etc
This is not a discussion, I'm asking a specific programming question.
I understand that the panel must have an interface for the user to change the values and save their configuration in a Database OR save their configuration directly in the new css file.
I'm just not sure which way would be the "best" way.
How would 'you' do it?
I would change the stylesheets with JavaScript, like:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="somestyle.css" id="stylesheet">
function changeStyle(cssfile) {
document.getElementById('stylesheet').href = cssfile;
}
I also would enter the user's selections via AJAX into the database, so when PHP creates the next page, it knows which styles the user has selected.
I apologize for my english. Correct the title if it's necesary, please.
I want different pages of my web site to have different images in some background divs.
I'm using one CSS file for all the site.
For example, the supportingText div for the "about me" page has different image than "my project page".
Right now I use inside every pages (aboutMe.html, myProject.html) for any supportingText div a style attribute for this task.
And for example:
When I want to let surfers change entire web site style design I can change to a different CSS file of course.
But if my pages have some different images, as I explained before, should I change others html files to do it?
I know that probably there is a solution in some way like in php.
Consider that I don't know anything about php but if you explain in very easy way won't be a problem to understand!! ;)
Is there a solution in javascript?
I'm using only XHTML and CSS.
EDIT
Thank you!
You have been very kind.
I understood everything except one concept that I hope you can clarify.
I have many divs with background images, as:
title - myPicture - navigation - supportingText
All of those have a grey levels images.
I would like users can change aspect of the web site.
Something like three options:
black and white pages
green pages
orange pages
So in this case I need to set divs images in a JavaScript script into html file as your example!
So the CSS file only is helpfull for dimension and all other staffs but not anymore for images background? Is it?
Thank you a lot!
I agree with John in that you really shouldn't hardcode style attributes into the HTML. But if for whatever reason you have to you can easily change them using JavaScript.
document.getElementById('supportingText').style.backgroundImage = 'url("image.jpg")';
or if you're using jQuery
$('#supportingText').css('background-image', 'url("image.jpg")');
Update:
Assuming you're using a button to trigger the change, the code (which you would put in your HTML document) would look something like this:
<script type="text/javascript">
function changeBackground(divId, newImage) {
document.getElementById(divId).style.backgroundImage = 'url("' + newImage + '")';
}
</script>
<button onclick="changeBackground('supportingText', 'image.jpg');">Change Background</button>
Essentially what you're doing here is creating a button which calls a JavaScript function (changeBackground()), and you're passing in the ID of the div that you want to change, and the name of the image file that you want to change it to. You could have multiple buttons with different values in the 'supportingText' and 'image.jpg' parameters.
Answer to Part 2:
You can apply styles via CSS or JS (as above). However anything you do in JS will override your CSS. It's really up to you how you divide it up.
If you have hard coded your styles, even just some of them, into your HTML and you want these values to change when someone chooses a new stylesheet then you're in a tough position. Hardcoding those styles into your HTML makes your code inflexible and leaves you unable to make things such as switching stylesheets dynamically easy either with PHP or JavaScript.
Your best bet is to remove the hardcoded style rules from your HTML and place them into your stylesheet. Then switching the stylehseet can be done easily with PHP or JavaScript.
If you can't remove them then you'll need to write your own JavaScript to do this which will be tedious as it will need to dynamically alter each page when it loads. Not only will this probably take a long time to do and be error prone but it can hurt your website's performance if it isn't done well.
Basically, by hardcoding style rules into your HTML you've tied your own hands and have no good options available to you. I recommend removing the hardcoded styles and making sure you avoid doing it again in the future. Not only to avoid issues like this but to make your site faster by allowing your CSS to be cached.
i'm looking for a way to display a web page inside a div of other web page.
i can fetch the the webpage with CURL, but since it has an external stylesheet when i try to display it, it appears without all his style properties.
i remember facebook used this technique with shared links (you used to see the page that was linked with a facebook header)
did some unsuccessful jquery tests but I'm pretty much clueless about how to continue..
i know this can be done with frames but i always here that it's good practice to avoid frames so i'm a bit confused
any ideas how to work this out?
If you want to display the other website's contents exactly as they are rendered in that site then frames are, in this case, the best (easiest) way to go.
Facebook and Google both use this technique to display pages while maintaining their branding / navigation bar above the other site.
I am going to guess that Facebook still used an iFrame, just with no borders and a well placed header outside of it. The reason I am guessing that is because if the outside page has its own style sheet, there is a high probability that your styles and their styles will clash and not show things properly.
In order for the styles not to clash everything on both ends would have to be extremely detailed, not just generic styles applied to all paragraphs etc...
i agree that using frames would probably be the best solution for you problem.
but if you still want to avoid frames and put the contents into a div with the id externalConent, you could request the stylesheets the same way you get the other contents and prefix every rule in them with "#externalContent ". save these stylesheets to your server and include them in your page. with a few more customizations, that should work.
i have to admit this solution does sound quite strange... well, it is.
but it's the only way i see to do what you're asking for.
If you are unable to use a frame or iframe, try:
extract the HTML inside the BODY and inserting it into the destination DIV
extract the and sections at the header
Is not very clean though, but it will definitely work, you can insert a phpBB forum into another dynamic way using this technique, take a look at http://www.clearerimages.com/forum/ for an example.