About This Article •
Well if you’ve been wondering what I’ve been so busy with the last 10 days, it’s Tabouli for RapidWeaver 4.0. This is a pre-release notice.
June 8, 2008 4:50 PM
Well if you’ve been wondering what the heck I’ve been doing for the last week, it’s rewriting the entire Tabouli theme for RapidWeaver 4.0. Tabouli is still one of my favorite site designs and this site, 11Mystics, has many of the same elements.
I’m in the home stretch with this rewrite now, but still have some things to tidy up. I haven’t had the chance to prep it for IE6 yet, but I have things moving nicely with all other browsers.
I have a test site set up if you’d like to take a peek at the new styles and read about all the options and features. For the most part, it’s still Tabouli, but when you start to look more closely, you’re going to notice some fairly big changes, the least of which is that I’ve ripped out all the images that were producing the round corners. This will be great news for anyone that was wishing they could pick their own colors for the tabs and footer areas, because NOW YOU CAN! :D In fact you can control the colors of over 120 different theme elements.
All the round corners are produced with CSS now. The theme is infinitely lighter, faster and flexible as a result. The one drawback to that is that not every browser supports those round corners yet. Well… let’s just be specific here: it’s IE and Opera that won’t show them. In those two browsers you’ll see square corners. However all other major browsers already support round corners (Safari, Firefox, Flock, Netscape). Open the test site in different browsers to see how it fares. Avoid IE6 - I haven’t gotten to that one yet.
In the last two days I’ve had surprise requests to do Lightside for RapidWeaver so that’s on the list. Aerolite will be created as well, but I have to get Tabouli completed and released here first. This rewrite has over 100 hours into it already, but after that they should go faster.
P.S. Check out the Salsa theme style! Course Saucy Nightclub is pretty cool too. I’ll make a bunch of interesting theme styles and package them into the theme for you.
Here’s are two screenshots of the Styles Inspector which illustrate the way I formatted the options. This made it much easier to find and change the options you want.
Suzanne: Very impressive! I loved going through the demo site. It does work quicker, but the added options/formatting you’ve provided is wonderful! I really look forward to working with this new version of the theme!
I’ll be interested to hear what you think once you have a chance to take it for a spin Mathew. Should be this week if I can get access to IE6 and get the hacks in place for that browser. I also have to solve some positioning issues, move a few things around in the plist file. Wait til you see the options list - I even formatted the display of options so that you can find what you’re looking for. I’ll post a picture in the entry for example.
I just realized I hadn’t published the last edits which included the Saucy Nightclub theme style. Publishing now.
Wow, really looking forward to it! I leave the country for a month in a week, so this may be perfect timing: I can “play” with the new theme version while on vacation.
Looking more and more fantastic! Go S!
Mathew you’re as bad as me… trekking the planet with laptop always handy. I go nowhere without mine. What day are you leaving - I’ll try to wrap it up asap.
Niko - my late night cohort. The the only one up with me at 3am :)
What else is a musician/computer nerd to do at night? Surely we don’t sleep. :-)
S: I leave Sunday June 15th. That would be fantastic if the new Tabouli was out the door by then!
Rockin! I *just* solved my header logo and text alignment issues!! That one has been troubling me for days. I wanted the site title and tagline positioned to the bottom of the header area, but to do that, you have to use position: absolute; in your CSS. If you do that, you can’t use floats. So the dilemma was how the heck do I float the text 15px to the left or right of the logo image, yet still absolute position the text to the bottom of the header. Ugh. So glad I didn’t have to use display: table-cell :-/
I’m not even sure I can explain how I did it, but here’s the beauty of this solution. You can now insert any size image into the header using the built-in logo feature in site setup. Enable the logo there first, then go to the inspector and “Show Logo”.
No matter what size your logo is, the header automatically sizes its height to fit the image and automatically positions the site title and tagline based on the alignment option you choose. Dang this is going to be awesome! :)
Score! Go Suzanne!
WOW! What an update?
Is this available as an update to previous owners of Tabouli Standard?
Also, what are the differences in the Standard vs the Pro versions?
Hector
Hey Hector - yep this update will be available for the standard version as well. I just have to make sure everything is solid and working first. I believe I have all of the (known) bugs resolved for all the major browsers, including crappy IE6. I just have to apply them here and retest.
The difference between pro and standard will be how many options and built-in theme styles are available for each.
Looks great, Suzanne, I’m definitely going to have a piece of Tabouli once you done!
Marten