September 22, 2008
I have not been diligent enough at getting valuable information out to you guys so I’m going to try, at least once a day, to post an FAQ type question for iWeb, RapidWeaver, WordPress or something related to web design, development or e-commerce in general.
Today I’m going to address a question I get ALL the time. The question comes in many different forms, but the crux of it is always something like:
Do any of your iWeb themes include a store?
Do any of your iWeb themes support Flash?
How flexible is (theme name)? Can I customize the layout?
Can you create an iWeb theme that includes (insert third-party application here)?
Here’s the dealio with iWeb themes folks… iWeb themes are basically stylesheets. They’re only a collection of information about the way a page looks. It’s information like which fonts should be used, font sizes, which colors should be used for various things, whether shadows should be used, which objects are placed on the page and where they’re placed.
iWeb themes do not contain functionality, meaning what the page is capable of doing is not stored within the theme. All functionality, such as a blog or the photo album, is created by and stored within the iWeb application itself. The theme only references the functionality that iWeb provides.
What does that mean in simple terms? Well for the most part, it means that iWeb can no nothing more through a theme than what iWeb provides as functionality. I cannot extend iWeb’s functionality through my themes. Now it *is* possible to include configured widgets in a theme. I have not personally done this because I haven’t seen the need, but theoretically, you can extend functionality in that way. However, massive functionality like high-powered slideshows or e-commerce functionality cannot be included via a simple iWeb widget. Those are functions that require JavaScript in the header or footer of the page itself and even integration with outside partners.
So the bottom line here is, no iWeb theme, whether Apple creates it or whether I create it, can provide advanced functionality not supported by iWeb itself. This may change with future releases, but as of 2.0.4, this is not the case.
About This Entry
FAQ functionality, iweb theme, widget
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