6: Dragonfly Themes

The dragonfly theming system is actually quite simple from a designer view, forget about opening theme.php for a minute.

If you are using the dragonfly theme...first open your css in your favorite text editor.
Inside you will see the links to the header and background logos. Insert your image here and play around with it's size compared to the layout.

Now open the html template files from the themes/dragonfly/templates folder in your favorite WYSIWYG local html editor like Dreamweaver, Topstyle or any html editor that doesn't rewrite table or div code (frontpage2K is not suggested).

Attach the themes stylesheet to it (i.e. temporarily link href="themes/dragonfly/style/style.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet").
You should be able to see a portion of the sites template as you would online but editable. Now manipulate the css and html code to your wishes.

To see your changes sitewide quicker without having to upload it each time, run a test site locally using apache, MySql and PHP and always use a browser that doesn't cache css.

You should be able to manipulate the style of the page without touching any php code.

The templates have {CONTAINERS} for the information from the php. This {INFO} is replaced by the output of the php code in modules and the core. You have full control of where these containers are displayed or whether they are at all... you could leave some out without an issue... like say you don't want the posters name on the news stories....you could remove {newstopic.S_INFORMANT} from the template. To change the color of something find the style tag or other tag closest to item and modify that.

Next ⇒ adding vars to be displayed in templates