Hi Joel,

So are you looking for something other than what you get when you click a theme's Customize button in the dashboard? Or are you just looking to make that same functionality available from the toolbar so the user doesn't have to go to the dashboard?

-Steve

Does the customize button actually give the user the ability to change background, nav background, link colors, etc? I haven't been able to get that button to work as of yet..

C5 provides the hooks, but the theme developer has to build the customization capability into the theme. I've tried it with the default (Plain Yogurt) theme, and it works fine.

See here...

http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/developers/pages/configurabl...

-Steve

I did exactly what it said and it didn't work..

I made the link at the top of my style sheet..
<link rel="stylesheet" media="screen" type="text/css" href="<?php echo $this->getStyleSheet('/css/site.css')?>" />

I add comments like this to my style sheet..

body {
/* customize_font-family */font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
/* customize_font-size */font-size: 69.5%;
/* customize_color */color: #676767;
/* customize_background */background: url(/images/bg-body.gif) repeat-x;
}

and then went into customize them and it said the site wasn't set up for customizing.. : (

I see that I was supposed to put the comment before and after the tags.. but that didn't work either.

Is this just for colors.. or can you give users the ability to click on browse buttons and add images?

Anyone?

This css file will need to reside in the root of your site, hanging out with the default.php file. Im not sure why but it does. It cant be in a sub folder (i.e. /css/).


Using this format:


Also, do not use anything but pixels for your font calls. 67.89% may or will get changed into 6789px which, as you can guess, will really not work out well.

Steve

Thanks Steve! That helps a lot. Do you know if you can attach images for backgrounds using this process?

Also... Do I have to move my entire style sheet into the main directory.. or can I just add another style sheet specifically just for customized elements that will automatically override the /css/ style sheet? It seems that would actually be a lot cleaner..

The way I've been doing it lately is to design the theme with a reset.css and a styles.css. Once you have it looking perfecto add the typography.css last so that it overrides everything else, if it has a value.

Now the other css files can go into a separate folder if you want but I don't bother.

Make your typography just a duplicate of the styles.css and then delete everything that isn't styling a color or a font (those are the only two things you can style with typography.css). Wrap the other things in the requisite /*customize_*/ tags and you should be good to go.

Oh and don't forget about the font call. You can use percentages if its NOT going to be customizable.

steve

Hi Joel,

Did you get this working? Don't know if it will help, but have you tried clearing and/or disabling the site cache?

-Steve

I did get it working.. Thanks! Though I still would be extremely interested in finding a way to add the ability to attach images on this customization page. If not through the default functionality of this page.. then I'd be very interested in talking to a programmer that could help me add this.. That would completely streamline the integration process and make it so anyone with basic WORD processing skills could customize or integrate their own site. Without the ability to attach images.. it really kind of limits this feature.

> Though I still would be extremely interested in finding a way to
> add the ability to attach images on this customization page.

Would you want the user to be able to select a file from the file manager?

-Steve

No. Just the ability to attach images for backgrounds and to select whether it's a repeating backgound or not. Without that you really can't do anything impressive.

Also noticed if you build the site with a graphic background... But give the user the ability to change it to a color.. It doesn't over ride the image.. It just shows up behind it?

It would be great to have a background-image selector for those style customizations. I'd think it would have to go through the file manager though (well, it wouldn't have to, but since you'd need the user to upload an image anyway, why not use that?)

Anyway, I think your color isn't overriding the background image just because that's the way CSS works (you can specify a color and an image -- the image always appears, the color is just for the areas where the image doesn't reach if you have it set to no-repeat).

Wish I had a solution, but for the time being I don't think it's possible to do this. I do have this on my todo list of core contributions though, so maybe some time in the next 2-104 weeks it can happen(?)

The file manager wouldn't solve the problem because even if they uploaded an image using the file manager.. they wouldn't be able to attach it to the background without knowing how to edit code.

I know that it can pull both a color and a background.. but since the customization page doesn't have any ability to replace the image.. the image will always show up on top of the color.. so there's no way for the user to replace the image. I thought that since my customization style sheet was in the main directory and the rest of it was in a css directory that the customization style sheet would take precedent over it.. but that's not the case.

If this is something you know how to do and would be interested in getting paid to do it.. I would be very interested in a quote from you on this.

I have 40 or 50 websites that I need to convert to Concrete5 and most of them have graphic backgrounds.. I'd like to be able to just hand them over to a temp or virtual assistant to bang them out.. but without the ability to attach images.. that wouldn't work.

Let me know if you're interested.

I normally would be happy to quote this for you but I currently have a full plate for the next few months with prior client commitments. I would suggest that if you can't find someone to do this for you that instead you could just use a generic file name for the background image, and place it at the top level of your site (or some other place that is not within the specific theme name so the path is generic across all sites). Then your CSS for the background image is the same for every site, and your temp would just have to swap out that one image. Not ideal, I realize, but may be easier to explain how to upload that one file than anything else.

BTW, the thing I was saying about the file manager was just the hypothetical situation where this feature did exist -- it would still require the image to be uploaded *somehow*, and I figured the file manager would be the easiest way to achieve this.

-Jordan