By Bo Nørgaard on Thursday, August 07, 2008

I changed the layout of the divs, from fixed/relative to absolute. The skin was build with the header, menu and footer area as fixed areas, and the content area as relative. This setup uses the vertical scrollbar at the full height of the browser, which was part of the design fault that led me to remove the footer. Another issue with this setup was that I had to ensure that content was not hidden under the header and footer area.

I changed all areas (divs) to absolute positioning and reintroduced the footer again, as I really didn't like having the copyright and legal parts in the header. This also moved the vertical scrollbar into the content div, which both looks and feels right. The footer was reduced in size from two lines to one line, because I will keep the breadcrumbs in the header area.

Right now I believe that the skin is done, but let's see what I think next month :-)

By Bo Nørgaard on Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Removing the footer from the skin has another impact in IE, the content area is getting wider, so IE shows a horizontal scrollbar -  non of the other browsers do that. My admin screens are using the old layout, and here everything looks fine in IE.

I guess that its time to look at the general layout, as I don't need all these floating div's when there are no footer area. I really dislike all the things you need to do to make a border layout with xhtml and css, with frames or table designs it could be done in minutes - not weeks.

By Bo Nørgaard on Tuesday, August 05, 2008

After looking at the skin for the last month, I found that the content area looked to framed by the colored borders.

When the content was too large for the content area, it was hidden by the footer - this looked more like an error than designed on purpose.

So moved the content from the footer to the header, and removed the footer.

Then I had a long argument with IE about font sizes... FireFox and Safari on both my Windows and iMac (yes I have an apple mac with a nice 24" screen) was showing all my changes, where IE ignored me. Finally I managed to get all the font sizes to look, almost but not entirely unlike each other.

I am so happy that it is not my design skills that pay the bills.

By Bo Nørgaard on Monday, August 04, 2008

Now the vacation is over, and I have started working again. I did believe that I could find the time to do DotNetNuke development in the evenings, but I have been so busy in the vacation, that it’s nice to get back to work and relax a bit ;-)

So what did I do in the last part of the vacation? Well actually a lot of work on our house. I removed the floor from two rooms and two bathrooms. I also took down the wall between the two bathrooms as we are moving a square meter from the large one to the small one, which provides us with two good bathrooms. I installed new water drains and pipes, including a new pipe for heating the new floor, and the last part was to create a new concrete floor. Next in line is creating the new wall.

Tonight I will try to look into all the different projects that I had open, and prioritize these so I can close as many as possible this week.

4 weeks with minimal keyboard activity made me eager to get started again, and with the coming version 5 of DotNetNuke I believe that it’s going to be an exiting fall this year.