Hi Arik,
I can give you my personal opinion on this:
STK is great if you are working "top down" - start with the default STK site,
and tweak the templates and especially the CSS until you get it the way you
like. This way of working is good if you are a web-designer yourself.
STK is a lot less useful if you are working "bottom up", i.e. starting with a
"finished" layout, like from templatemonster. It would be *much* more work to
adapt all the STK templates and CSS to look like the templatemonster layouts
than to simply create new template definitions. Often the templatemonster
layouts have completely different "content models" than the default STK site,
making it pretty much impossible to directly use STK.
When working with finished layouts, I do the following:
- print out your templates (I like to do this on paper) and using a pen or
pencil draw on the print-outs in order to:
- decide what page types you are going to use, and what areas your layout
will offer in these page types
- decide what components you are going to offer, and what the "features" of
your components are
- decide how the navigation will work, and what navigation elements you
will have (horizontal, vertical, footer-links, breadcrumbs)
- identify "tricky" parts: AJAX components, special features, interactive
features
- create a new site definition, copying from "default" (or simply inheriting
from default)
- create the template prototype in your site definition, defining the areas you
identified beforehand
- create the "main" template script, and copy your templatemonster HTML layout
into this script
- create a template definition for the start-page, and create the start-page in
the website repo assigning your template definition, so that you can look at it
- upload the resources (CSS, JS, images) and adjust the URLs in the main
template and the CSS so that everything looks right, and images and CSS are
loaded correctly
- now "magnolia-ize" your template:
- create JS and CSS definitions in your theme, and replace the hard-coded
links in your template with the freemarker code to load the CSS and JS from the
theme
- for each area, create an area template script, cut the HTML from the main
template and put it in the area, and replace it with the freemarker code to
render the area (if area is enabled)
- proceed with sub-areas in the same way
- proceed with your components once you have all your areas
- then create the other page template definitions, switching areas on and off
(or substituting alternate scripts) as appropriate for your layout
- create additional areas and components as required by the other page templates
- hey presto, you're done!
I find the important trick is to start with the main template containing all
the HTML, and then cutting it up into areas, step by step. In this way you have
a "clickable" demo right from the start, which becomes more and more "editable"
as you create all the magnolia definitions.
I've been meaning to create a kind of demo-video showing how this is all done,
since there are always endless questions about templating on this list. ;-) I
just can't seem to find the time to do so...
Note also that even when I use my own template definitions, I still make them
type "stk" and use the STK template models. I find these models have some
useful functionality and there is no reason not to use them with your own
templates.
Regards from Vienna,
Richard
________________________________________
Von: [email protected] [[email protected]]"
im Auftrag von "arik (via Magnolia Forums) [[email protected]]
Gesendet: Dienstag, 19. März 2013 19:06
An: Magnolia User List
Betreff: [magnolia-user] Custom Theme
Hello,
I used Magnolia in the past for several projects and am very satisfied with it.
So far, on these projects I did not leverage the power of STK though, since I
was using ready-baked templates from themeforest.com or templatemonster.com or
what have you.
While I am very happy with the Magnolia CMS backend (which is the primary
reason I chose Magnolia to begin with) I feel that I am not harnessing its full
potential due to not using the STK.
Does anyone have an experience with customizing the STK to fit a ready-baked
template and is it worth it?
-Arik
--
Context is everything:
http://forum.magnolia-cms.com/forum/thread.html?threadId=fb317e82-d6f5-403a-8c83-f92c823b0636
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