Quote:
Originally Posted by holograph
AJHall, I have some points to relay as feedback from working with your member templates:
Get rid of fractured tables in html, by 'fractured' I mean tables that are generated from various template pieces where table can start in one file continue in other files with some more tables, etc. Once we did complete members design with our own sliced html of course, without tables - man, it was a pain to bring it over into your templates, although I love smarty ;)
I haven't looked in a while at ElevatedX templates, if you still use tables I would suggest make your members templates table-less except only where it's required for tabular data. We could help with it btw, we have very good html coders on our staff.
Personally, I usually don't require any live support when working with new systems given it has good documentation along with it where
general template file structure covered and or visualized;
which templates are part of others;
list of all available variables/arrays/objects and mention whichever only available to certain templates;
guide how new pages can be created and linked within;
instructions how a new theme could be created/added/copied, since editing default is never a good idea, and maybe add a feature to quickly switch between them from admin and add ability for devs to test out theme before applying it in live production.
templates need to be as flexible and simple as possible, then designers can do with them as they please - bring over their code or adjust current code/style easily.
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There's no use of fractured tables in our latests CMS version (3.2). The templates for this version were redone entirely and every sub-section of a major page has been broken into its own Smarty sub-template for easier editing.
Our templates use divs where possible and rely on a CSS file for all styles. Tables are still used for the main layouts of various page sections.
We tried table-less CSS templates back in 2007 and it didn't go over well with our customers. We then reverted back to tables. It's great for designers but a lot of our customers are not designers. Not all of them want to redo their whole site with a custom design, many just want to edit basic things. We found that giving them simple old school HTML code made it easier for them to recognize the code and make simple edits.
Making things both flexible and simple to edit is always the goal. It's not easy when dealing with a complex system with literally 100s of functions and features but we're always working toward achieving that. Improving and simplifying the template system further is a big part of our plans for 2012 and we will definitely take this feedback into consideration.
Thanks for sharing your feedback!
If other designers have feedback or suggestions please email it to me directly at
[email protected]
AJ