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Lost templates

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Jonas Brown

Monday 16 August 2004 6:25:08 am

Hi,

I have been trying (unsuccesfully) to change some of the colours the site uses, specifically fonts, quote boxes etc. Not sure what I have changed but now when I go into look and feel there is no template list and no admin email address

Can anybody help with this (and/or changing the colours - please don't say ammend the CSS because I have been tring to ammend those and nothing seems to make any difference at all)

Mark Marsiglio

Monday 16 August 2004 7:56:44 am

In order to adjust the CSS you have to work on the correct version. My research seems to show that if you select your template through the Look and Feel section of the 3.4 admin, the CSS files are actually located in the /ezpublish/packages/styles/t01[or your style number]/files/default/file/design/base/stylesheets/[yourstylenumber]/ folder. Kind of deep and hard to find, but that is where the package version resides.

I usually amend the pagelayout for my selected template to call stylesheets from the design/mysitename/stylesheets/ folder and then copy the CSS from the package location to that folder for editing. This removes the ability to change the site colors using the admin for that particular site, but I typically only do this once from the start.

Modifying the CSS is the best way to make the changes that you would like to make. They are a little hard to make sense of at first, but after getting to know your way around the structure makes a lot of sense.

If you have lost access to the admin version of the management of styles and colors, the steps above might fix that. If not, you might want to reinstall, as this is sometimes the easier way to fix an unknown problem if you have not gotten too far into your design. You can keep the data by selecting your existing database in the install process.

Hope that helps,
Mark

http://www.thinkcreative.com
Turning Ideas Into Strategic Solutions

Jonas Brown

Monday 16 August 2004 8:25:21 am

Thanks for that mark.

I have found the files you mention yet changing the colours doesn't seem to make any difference at all.

I'm kinda getting to give up on this - so far I have changed what feels like hundreds of colour codes in countless styl sheets and it doesn;t make any difference

I'd rather not do a reinstal unless I can be sure the content will come across

Mark Marsiglio

Monday 16 August 2004 8:41:19 am

The sure way to tell is to look at the HTML source in a web browser and see what file it is pointing to. It should include the full path there.

Also, make sure to clear your cache. You can use the admin function to do this, but when I have a change that is not taking effect as expected, I take a few additional steps to be sure.

1) throw away the cache folder for your site in the /var/yoursite/ folder. Leave the storage folder.
2) empty your browser cache

Also, another step in troubleshooting CSS is to make sure that another stylesheet is not overriding your settings. The last style found is the one that is used for a particular setting, and they load in the order that they are listed in the top of the page (last one is at the bottom). If you are setting a color in the core.css, and that style has a color set in the classes-colors.css, it will override your setting and it will appear to have no effect.

The best way to make sure this is not what is causing your problem is to change a color to an obvious setting in the last stylesheet that is loaded and see if that has any effect.

Keep in mind that the stylesheets in the default installation come from two locations - two (both end in -colors.css) from the packages folder, and four from the design/base/stylesheets folder (site.css, classes.css, core.css, and debug.css).

http://www.thinkcreative.com
Turning Ideas Into Strategic Solutions

Jonas Brown

Monday 16 August 2004 9:40:04 am

Mark - thanks for your patience - your help has meant for the first time I have managed to change the colours.

One last entry I cannot seem to see in the style sheets is the large header colours - which css are these usually in?

Mark Marsiglio

Monday 16 August 2004 10:26:02 am

the header colors are set in two places--

In the site-colors.css, there are h1, h2, h3, h4, etc. These colors override settings placed in core.css which contains the other components of the h1-6 styles (size, font, etc).

The second place is that in some instances this is overrided by the classes-colors.css in which some headers might be a different color based on class.

Good luck!
Mark

http://www.thinkcreative.com
Turning Ideas Into Strategic Solutions

Jonas Brown

Tuesday 17 August 2004 5:28:52 am

Mark, thanks for your help.

As a novice at these things I was struggling but you posts mean I have now been able to:-

Change Font
Change all the font colours
Add a background colour to the left menu

etc etc - I've still a way to go - and I'm now looking at whether I can add a user only area that can only be accessed via a user name and password we generate (Ie customers only) - but I am sure that will be a whole other set of posts for the future

So once again thanks for the help