Hi Arlo, I will try to answer some of these questions as best as I can, inline:
"The only real difficulty I encountered was with single column portal screens...Even though it's not technically correct it would make skinning easier if the single column had extra div elements with .left and .right so you didn't have to worry about writing more CSS statements to accommodate single portal columns." If I understand you correctly, you need two extra containers to accomodate special graphical effects on either side of a column? At this point in time, FSS is more about general layouts and arrangements - the column mechanisms only provide a default gutter, consistent width and padding, and not much more. Something as specific as this graphical effect is really meant to be written as you have done- by a CSS author. Im wondering if this is not possible by recycling existing markup instead of creating explicit left and right graphic containers? "Another issue is understanding the new .fl css. (fl-tabs, fl-listmenu, etc)...An explanation of what these new CSS conventions are used for would be helpful." These helper class names are meant to be used with some common markup patterns to quickly get you up and running for some simple GUI elements, like Tabs, Widgets, Menus, etc. How those are defined out-of-the-box is explained in-depth on the FSS wiki page and in the examples on the Fluid build site (eg. http://build.fluidproject.org/ for all sorts of different setups and uses. The Sakai Mock Up is the most fleshed out) All of these "advanced layout" helpers have a basic wireframe appearance (no colors, just a layout), plus a themed appearance (colors and graphics), to allow you to modularly build up your front end. For each different type of "thing", there is a role and reason it exists: the wiki document goes into depth for each. "My next concerns are with portlet CSS...For example, for a main heading in a portlet, should I just use an h1 tag? (Styled by fluid.theme.*.css .fl-theme-mycp3 h1) Or should I use JSR168 (.portlet-section-header)" Why not use both: <h1 class="portlet-section-header"> ? FSS likes good semantics, and your encouraged to sprinkle your class names as needed. "Looking at the jsr168.css file I see stuff like .portlet-menu. Should I use this or .fl-listmenu?" Again, maybe you should use both? "I think people would really appreciate a broader overview of these topics and good CSS practices as it relates to the portal. Maybe this can be added to the uPortal 3 manual and a link could be put in the main CSS file so people aren't so confused." I agree. Gary and I were discussing a while back to create a JSR168 guide to uPortal. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Copying-a-Skin-in-3.1-tp22730053p23042034.html Sent from the uPortal - Developer mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev
