Simplifying stylesheets and templates
Hi, I recently set up a new TW website for an organization, and for that occasion I wanted to make a brand new css. However I rapidly had to give up because it consumed 100% of my webmasters's time and made me several days late in delivery.
I'm not claimling I am extremely good or extremely bad at css, I think you could consider me a landmark for the active volunteer maybe. That is, if I have difficulties, then everybody below computer sciences degree will have difficulties.
To be more precise, I found the numbers of entries in the css to be monstruous. Given the amount of time I had it was like a mountain. I have seen other portals where the number of entries is reduced.
Now, another problem is that the templates will sometimes contradict what you want to do through the css. There seems to be too many tables in the templates for instance.
There are also surprising things, such as header div not being in tiki-main. Which means I had to specify the same background, width and so on two times. Maybe it sounds logical to you, but when I had read in the css that tiki-main encompasses the whole TW app, I had understood that meant the header too.
In the same way, I didn't expect that the footer could be in tiki-mid. I thought the footer was... below.
Last, as usual a reaction in that sort of criticism is to say "you just have to tweak the templates". That's a choice of development. Mine is to make the css author the master of the display.