Adriatico's Blog

You will need a few tools for your work. I have provided them on the CD that comes with this book. Please resist any temptation to use tools from elsewhere. They will be excellent when you have gained confidence and fluency with programming. However, their complexity will overwhelm you while you are struggling to learn to program. It is enough to try to do something new without also trying to do it in an unnecessarily complicated environment.
You also need something to manage these tools with rather than having to remember every detail for yourself. Programmers use things called IDEs (Integrated Development Environments), which are rather like carpenters’ workbenches. Those that come with commercial compilers, or even the free ones that are used by experienced programmers, have a multitude of options that will simply get in your way and lead to confusion. (No differences here, then; professional work environments are rarely suited to the newcomer.)
So I have chosen a very simple IDE written and maintained by Al Stevens. He calls it Quincy and it provides just what we want: enough to work with but no frills to get in the way. If you have followed the instructions for installing the software you will have installed Quincy somewhere on your system (perhaps on the C drive, but possibly somewhere else; I have my copy on my E drive). You should have an icon of a cat’s face on your desktop. Click (or double-click, depending on how your system is set up) on it to open Quincy.

There are some things that you need to do every time you prepare to write a new program. I am going to walk you through them this time with images from my screen to help you. Until you get used to it, come back to this section each time you start a new program and follow through these steps.

• Create a new project Select ‘‘Project’’ by double-clicking on it (or click and select ‘‘OK’’). Type ‘‘my first program’’ (get into the habit of giving descriptive names to projects and other files) in the Target name box. Use the browse button to find the sub-directory. You should find that in the directory called ‘‘tutorial’’ on the drive where you installed the tools from the CD. When you have found it, left click the OK button in the browse dialog box. Check that the ‘‘Type of Build’’ selected is ‘‘Console application’’.
• Set the project options Select the ‘‘tools’’ menu and choose options. You should see the image at the top of the next page. Make sure that the boxes have been selected as in this image. Then use the browse button beside the Includes box to find the sub-directory called ‘‘fgw headers’’. That should be one of the other sub-directories in the same place. Click OK in the browse dialog and then click OK in the Options dialog box.
• Get the special libraries Much of the programming you will be doing relies on two special files. Do not worry about exactly what they are; they contain resources that one of the programming tools will need. You have to find these two files and include them in the project. Click on the Project menu and select ‘‘Insert Files’’. You should then use the drop down menu in the dialog box to find the fgw headers sub-directory. You should then see something like this (the exact file list may be different, but the two important files fgwlib.a and libgdi32.a should be there. (If they are not in the sub-directory, your installation from the CD is faulty. Copy the contents of the fgw headers directory on the CD to tutorial\fgw headers.)
• Save the project Go to the File menu in Quincy and save the project.

Continuation from my last post. “Tutorial | Create Custom CSS Skin”.

In this section of the tutorial you will actually create the new skin that uses your custom images for buttons, and some other changes.
To start creating the skin, follow the next steps:

1. Duplicate the aqua folder in the includes/skins folder in your site root. Rename the duplicate with the same name as the desired skin. Since the main color of this template is green, let’s name the skin green.
2. Copy the button_big.gif and button_smallest.gif files from the zip package (or the folder where you created them) into the includes/skins/green/images folder. As mentioned in the previous page, the images folder stores all graphical elements used by the CSS files. When asked if you want to overwrite the existing files, click Yes. Also, copy the preview.gif file over the existing one in the includes/skins/green folder. This will allow you to identify the skin when selecting it in Dreamweaver.
3. Through this action, you have replaced the original buttons with the custom created ones. The buttons are already changed.
4. In order to see what changes are made, you must apply the skin. To do so, open the InterAKT Control Panel > CSS Skin and from the drop-down menu select the green entry.
5. Now upload the includes folder to your server. Notice how all buttons have already changed to the new images, without writing or changing a line of CSS code – for all pages: list, form and contact form.
6. If you want to use buttons of a different size however, you must edit the nxt.css and tng.css file, the section corresponding to each button type (big and smallest) and set the new width and height.
7. The next step into creating a new skin is to replace the color used when highlighting list rows. At this point, it still uses the dashes if gray from aqua.
8. For the highlight colors, there are two options to set in the CSS file: the color to use when moving the mouse over each row, and the one to use when the row is checked (after being clicked once). To alter them, you must change the following CSS sections:
   /* selected row (checkbox is clicked) */ .KT_tnglist tr.KT_highlight { background-color: #E2E2E2; } .KT_tnglist tbody tr.KT_over { background-color: #E2E2E2 ! important; }
9. The first color to set is when the row is selected. Let’s change the shade of gray to a shade of green: #BACDA0.
10. The second color to change is the color the row takes when the mouse is over it. Change it to #84D082. Save and upload the nxt.css file.
11. The last element to change regarding the NeXTensio list is the way even rows are colored. The CSS code handling this is the following: .KT_tnglist tr.KT_even { background-color: #F2F2F2; }
12. To display even rows in a different shade, replace the existing color (#F2F2F2) to #D5E6C1. Upload the nxt.css file and refresh the page. Results are immediate.
13. When adding new links to a list or form, you might want to give them the same look as the rest. In order to benefit from the automatic conversion to a button, and the usage of skins for all manually added links, you need to set their style property to use the KT_link class.

These are the first steps in creating a skin to integrate MX Kollection elements into your site. Just a few image editing operations, some CSS knowledge and you’re off.

In this tutorial you will learn how to adapt the MX Kollection 3 elements to better fit your existing design and style. All this is done by using the fact that most of the HTML elements inserted by the MX Kollection 3 wizards and server behaviors use CSS files.
Besides choosing from one of the skins provided, you can also create a skin that integrates with your existing site smoothly, in a simple manner.
The application used in this tutorial is the web-site of a small company, that uses for the design an existing template, and for the dynamic elements MX Kollection3 Bundle.
The modules needed to complete this tutorial are:

• The Transaction Engine

• NeXTensio

For the basic operations requested in order to create a new skin, basic knowledge of graphic editing is required, while for more advanced changes, you will need some knowledge of CSS.
In this tutorial, you will customize an application that has been already created, that contains three
pages:

• A NeXTensio List used to display the company products

• A NeXTensio Form used in conjuncture with the list, to allow editing of elements

• A Contact Form, that allows users send their messages through e-mail to the company.

The application uses a template design, and all that has to be changed are the list, form and contact form appearance, through the CSS files.

The tutorial wil not present how to create the NeXTensio list or form, or the contact form. These elements can be found in one of the other tutorials (for the NeXTensio list and form, see the Job site tutorial > Improve the Job Site > Receive job ads by e-mail ; to learn how to create the contact form that sends the e-mail message, see the How to Send Form Contents by E-mail (without using a database) tutorial. ).

The pages look as follows in the browser (no customization yet):

• The NeXTensio product list
• The NeXTensio form for one element
• The contact form

Planning the application

This first section of this tutorial helps you create all the files and database tables needed for the application.
Before you start building this application, make sure you have a correctly configured Dreamweaver site, and a working database connection. For more instructions regarding such actions, consult the Getting started help file, which can be found in Help -> InterAKT -> Getting Started.
Through the tutorial, you will have to create several files in your site’s root. The file structure will look as in the example below, and you can create it easily by unpacking the zip file corresponding to your server model from \tutorials\Custom CSS Skin\ in your site root.

Besides these files that are the actual pages that will be viewed from the browser, some more files and folders will appear in your site structure:

• Some images, that come with the site template

• The Dreamweaver created Connection folder

• The includes folder, created when an extension is used on a page.

Included in the zip file you can also find the template that has been used in the tutorial, as well as the new skin’s images and CSS files.
After having dealt with the file and folder structure, it is time to create the database structure that will be used throughout the site’s pages. The database is simple in nature, as it is not the scope of this tutorial, and contains only two tables:

• product_prd – the table that stores the company’s product list

• category_ctg – this table stores the different product categories.

The scripts already contains some data, in order for you to easily view the results.
Next, open the main index page and create a new connection named connAds and configure it to connect to your newly created database.

Create elements needed for the customization

The NeXTensio list and form, as well as the contact form will replace the section containing text in the image above. However, none of the existing skins match the selected design. None of the skins use green for buttons or backgrounds.
The finished application must display links as buttons, and the button styles must match the general design: to use some green on the background.
The easiest way to start when creating a new skin is to start from an existing one, and modify its elements to integrate it into the design, as shown in the User Manual. The skin used as a basis for this tutorial is the Aqua skin.
The first step to take before starting any work is to identify the elements you need changed. To accomplish this, open the pages in the browser, and decide which elements must be changed for each of them:

1. For the NeXTensio List: all buttons on the page: the buttons that replace the edit and delete links, the top and bottom rows buttons for adding a record, editing and deleting multiple records, and the navigation buttons.
2. For the NeXTensio Form:all available buttons.
3. For the Contact Form: only the submit button for the form must be changed, to match the rest of the site.

The main focus will be on the buttons. These must be created as images with a photo editing software (Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, etc), based on the site color scheme.
To find out how many and what size the new images must be, open the includes/skins/aqua/images folder. In this folder, all images used for the skin are stored: buttons, backgrounds, widget and error elements. The files that pose the most interest at this point are:

• button_big.gif – it is displayed as the buttons on the top and bottom row

• button_small.gif – which is not used in the current skin
• button_smallest.gif – used for all other buttons on the list, form and contact
  form.

In order to see exactly which files are used by the skin and in which manner, simply note down the styles used by the different elements as shown by Dreamweaver, and then open the nxt.css file – for the NeXTensio list and form, and the tng.css file – for the contact form. Locate the style classes noted earlier, and check the files that are used.
For example, the Add new link on the NeXTensio bottom and top row uses the KT_bottombuttons
class. This class is defined in the nxt.css file.

As you can notice from the code above, when viewed as buttons, the image used is images/button_big.gif. The path is relative to the CSS file, therefore the actual folder is the one specified earlier. Another important element supplied by the CSS code is the size of the image to use. In this case, the image to use for the button must have a width of 110 pixels, and a height of 20 pixels.
Do the same for the other buttons, to discover the file names and sizes
The edit and delete links shown next to each record in the NeXTensio list use the button_smallest file, with the following size: width: 50 pixels and height 20 pixels.
Once the required elements for the customization are identified, you can start creating them. If using the template provided with the tutorial, the button replacement images are also provided in the zip package.
Once the new images for the buttons are created, you can start creating the actual skin, and applying
it onto your site.

Will continue on the next post. “Tutorial | Create the new skin”.