Gav.... wrote:
Ok, so I have a site I have been throwing stuff into now and then, the
forums seem to be getting more popular, as are the stats steadily
rising. So I'd like to use forrest on it now.
The site in question is http://www.minitutorials.com .
...
To the point, how do I now convert this site to use Forrest , v3 if possible
but
earlier if it illustrates it better to me.
First thing to do is decide what you mean by "convert this site to use
Forrest". In your questions below you indicate many options. I'll give
you my own opinion and hopefully this will help you decide on exactly
what you mean.
David C prompted me into this inadvertantly with his HTML conversions of
Incubator to Anakia. Do I have to manually re-write all of my sites .html or
.php pages into xml source files or can I do this another way.
Forrest is about integrating multiple input types. No, you do not need
to convert your existing content. David is doing the reverse for the
Incubator. They have html and want to use Anakia, thus he is helping
them convert from html to the necessary format by using Forrest.
Forrest is already building the incubator site with the existing html
sources, no conversion is necessary.
Ah, theres
something, most of my pages are PHP, does that make a difference. If it
does, I'll get rid of them I dont care, theres not much PHP code that I cant
do another way (or get rid).
It really depends on what your PHP is doing. You mention (below) that
one use is the inclusion of the navigation on the left and the panels on
the right. This kind of inclusion need not be done in PHP, this would be
done by the dispatcher.
However, if you have some content that is being generated by PHP then
you may choose to keep that PHP code and embed the output within your
Forrest skinned page.
There is no one answer to this, you need to evaluate each case in
isolation. Forrest can support either keeping it or replacing it.
Then, looking at the site, can I then use CSS or whatever to somewhere near
resemble what I have currently or not - again, I don't care, its a useful
site, but
hardly earth-shattering and could probably do with a makeover anyway - which
when forrest-enabled I could do as often as I like with new themes right?
Not a problem. Your site is pretty close to the default theme in the
dispatcher. All that is required is to either modify the theme so that
it uses the CSS lass names you define in your existing CSS or, use your
existing CSS definitions with the current theme class names. The latter
is probably easier.
For an example look at the coat theme. This is really the default theme
with a few contracts removed and a modified CSS file. It does not define
any new contracts.
---
How to proceed?
I would forget about content in the first instance. Focus on getting
your theme to look right. Once that is done you can start migrating
content across.
Do "forrest seed-v22 and modify the *.fv file and the CSS. See the
recent thread David started regarding a "quick start" for dispatcher.
Ross
