My Portal Project

I just finished a new theme for my Wordpress blog that uses alot of the YUI libraries. The theme uses the Animation, Connection Manager, Container, DOM, Event, Tabview, Treeview, CSS Grid Layouts, and the CSS Reset libraries. Total development time, about 16 hours.

First, a hat’s off to the YUI and Wordpress teams who make this stuff easy enough for a hack like me. The extensive documentation and forward thinking of these two projects are awesome examples of community developed software.

The first two pieces of the new theme are the Reset.css, and the Grids.css. The first normalizes the browser environment so we can get rid of all the automatic CSS formatting that some browsers do without our asking (*couh IE cough*). The second provides the header/body/right nav/footer layout without any tables. I originally wanted to use something like Jack Slocum’s YUI-ext layout library, but I wanted a layout that was not dependent upon javascript to render. I always thought that the very least that should render is the page layout, before you start introducing potential errors to the user.

The second piece is the TabView that provides the content tabs across the top of the page. These tabs are also CSS based, but they have their default behaviors overriden/extended with javascript. The Tabview was an ok control to work with, but I failed to figure out how I could add a “close” icon to each tab. Instead I had to add a “Close the Tab” link to the top of each tab, or at least those I wanted closeable.

I used the Treeview class in my Archives section to make the individual months expandable. Probably overkill, but what the heck, it worked.

I used the Animation and Container libraries for my “pop-up” search, along with the Connection libraries to get the search results. I also used the Connection library to populate the content in the Bio, and Samples tabs.

All this fit so easily into the existing Wordpress theme framework that I felt I might have missed something ( not betting against that ). Alot of optimization, especially in the load times, are coming. My biggest boost will come from munging all of the separate YUI libraries into one file.

As usual, let me know of any buggy behaviors.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 9:24 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.