nicknormal

the A List Apart tutorials are very good, but require some in-depth reading, looking at example sites, source, etc. just be ready to loose a few hours when you start!

and i believe the other theme we’ve all seen with a horizontal navigation is Jillig. makes sense for page and sub-page navigation, not so much for other spaces like ‘links’ but whatever.

cheers
nick_normal

well now that i think about it, almost all the examples i’ve seen, or am interested in, are only one level of sub-pages deep. i’ve seen a few blogs/sites where 2+ levels made sense, but rarely.

so maybe we could start with a one-level solution and develop after that ??

spencerp, well the macromedia website uses… Flash! for their navigation!
obviously there are different ways to do this, but in a way that is natively familiar to a WP user (say a newbie) might be the challenge.
here’s a sub-menu that i reckon is completely driven by css:
https://nymag.com/news/index.html
scroll through the main nav, watch below, defnite IE hacks are needed here though.
and here:
https://roulette.org/
however their system somehow uses JavaScript because when JS is disabled the subnav doesn’t work.

i think there are two options here: having the theme with sub-pages only 1 level deep, which is specified in documentation/readme ‘Sub-pages will list only one level deep’ or attempt to get the extended sublevels to show via rollover… A List Apart has some examples of this. i had bookmarks… somewhere.

anyhow nice thread going here. nice to see some development spurring along.

cheers
nick_normal

ainslie,
thanks for the response! yes i have lots of patience! i would presume your template to be upgradeable too, or at least with documentation on anything that might need tweaking post-updgrade.

yes, i too thought over the weekend about the more-than-1 sub-pages dilemma. i’ve seen in other themes the sub-pages show up in a side column. but sometimes it’s not visually obvious the sub-pages are related to the page the user has navigated into, so i thought a solution to this would be a simple CSS hack: a thin colored stripe that goes under the main navigation (pages) and connects to left or right side column, which then goes vertically down the side column, same colour as the thin stripe, with all levels of sub-pages there. could be pretty effective i think, and if the colours are all relative i think it would be a logical navigation structure.

thanks for your insights.

cheers
nick_normal

Ainslie,

love the template, btw! one of the most fluid themes ive seen and very fast loading.

there are some things i can see myself wanting to develop inside the template, as well as a few other questions i have, and who better to ask than the author!

1. not sure how easy it is to change the sidebar widths without throwing the whole theme into disarray? is it simply changing one line of CSS or is there more involved? i think my employer and i would like to employ one sidebar with a little ‘extra-wide’ functionality – if it’s as simple as changing ‘sidebarleft’ to more pixels wide then great!

2. in the content column, if an image of say 1000 pixels width is inserted, does that push the whole template to ‘leftsidebar-padding-1000pixels-padding-rightsidebar’ wide? now don’t think i’m saying this is bad, this is actually what we want. we want our authors to be able to throw up 800w images w/o having to worry about resizing or using thumbnails. and want to make sure the whole theme will ‘flex’ to the width of whatever is thrown inside of it.

3. and then my main concern, which is why i started this thread: for subpages, we were thinking of something like in the WP admin interface, how the main navigation is blue with black text, but if you click on anything with multiple sub-menus, like ‘Options’ or ‘Presentation’, etc., you get that third row of black with white text, with the active page like a tab of white with black text. this is really how we think and how most of our audience would easily follow this navigation for pages and sub-pages, with all the other navigatable links to be thrown into the sidebars.

we’ll probably only start off with about 8 authors, but within two years we’ll be upwards of 30 because of the nature of our company, we’re a non-profit engaged with the arts community.

looking forward to version2, reallly great work by the way. cheers!

nick_normal

benedict: very interested! repost here or make a new thread, keep us up to speed!

background: url( images/name.gif ) repeat;

repeats it endlessly throughout the area.

background: url( images/name.gif ) repeat-x top #000;

repeats it endlessly throughout the top part of the area, fills the rest with black.

plenty of other examples on w3.org site about css.

i bookmarked this at home, i know you’re in a current WP2 competition, good luck.

you’ve developed quite a good number of themes, and all good! thems good ratios! glad to finally know where the author was that made some of these, i’ve seen them in the theme viewer and always appreciated them. cheers!

i could put this to use. thanks!

elidunn,

if you happen to be tracking this thread, then drop me a line so we can talk in the future about our findings.
my work email is [email protected]

not sure what your technical level is but we should share ideas.

cheers,
nick normal

thanks for the tips friends.
too bad the Mu version is ‘unstable’ but i think we’ll have a tinker with it anyhow ??
will report back if we have any success!

cheers
nick normal