CSS aka Cantankerous Spawn of Satan
This week I ahve been working on migrating the photo gallery at work to the latest and greatest version of “gallery”. The photo gallery software I used for my home gallery. The home gallery wasnt to big of a deal becasue I don’t really care if it doesnt look exactly like it used to. Work on the other hand is a different story. I really want it to look as if it belongs in the library website. I sat down and started learnign their API and started developing a theme that should mimik the site layout for the library. While working on that I discovered I woudl also have to learn their plugin API to add in the library menu properly so that future upgrades would not be a problem. Afer a little hair pulling and a LOT of code deciphering I succeded in adding in the library menu tree as a plugin module. I even got a little carried away and added configuration options into the gallery site admin page. Once that was done and I had a working menu, I discovered that the CSS is still not right and my fonts and list indents and bullets are all missing. They are all being overridden SOMEWHERE in the gallery theme. somewhere i have yet to find. I have the horrible feeling that i will end up spending two to three times the amount of time I spent on writing the plugin and learning to API, to debug the stupid CSS.
CSS is EVIL!!!
It’s not CSS’s fault that these templates have chopped things up and buried them in hard to find places. I had a really hard time getting started with CSS while trying to modify templates from Gallery, Coppermine, Wordpress, Drupal, etc. Then I started doing simpler web pages from scratch, using CSS, and building up from there. Now CSS makes a lot more sense, and I like it. Granted it’s not as easy as it could be, but it’s a good step forward.
Now I’m going back and working with those templates some more. From a programming perspective, I understand why the templates have turned out the way they have. From an end user perspective, I still find them highly frustrating, and the primary reason I haven’t made serious use of any of those tools.
Comment by Carl — 6/28/2006 @ 1:55 pm