hello. first I’d like to echo the thoughts mentioned in an earlier thread giving thanks to those who’ve put tons of time, effort and love into the free templates a lot of us use on our sites. you guys could be making lots of money off these things, and yet you choose to give them away. many thanks. when I get a few extra bucks I’ll definitely donate.
now, the situation. I was looking at the new carterlake/saratoga AJAX-PHP templates. I like the look, especially the fact that the information is presented in a narrow format that doesn’t fill the browser window. my site (link at the bottom) fills the browser window when opened, and the page geography changes if I make the window narrower or wider. this distorts the way the site looks, especially at lower screen real estate rates (1280x1024 vs 1024x768 vs 800x600 etc…) and different browsers. I also love the different color choices for the themes (the black is really sharp!).
the problem is for me I’m having the worst time trying to wrap my head around the whole PHP thing and I’m very confused.
so, until I can get some real time off and majorly concentrate on moving to the new templates, is there a way I can take the qualities I like about those templates and apply them to my current site?
your thoughts would be much appreciated. thank you…
Well, sure… the templates just have a common HTML structure with various parts of the page identified by a class=“name” or id=“name” that is associated with a CSS style.
The HTML markup for various
s just serves to identify what part of the page this area contains, and the CSS tells the browser how to render it for viewing.
The AJAX/PHP templates use the same names for major parts of the site as the original carterlake/HTML and carterlake/HTML/AJAX templates use … so if your site already uses an earlier version of the carterlake template, you can just bag the CSS and associate it with your pages (instead of weather-screen.css).
What the PHP stuff provides (besides complication for someone not familiar with PHP) is a really nice way to make ALL your site pages uniform, and provide mechanisms to change a common element in one place, and have the changes appear on all the pages in the site. A big bonus for consistent look/feel. The PHP template also has pre-integrated many of the popular PHP scripts into the site, and configuration is done generally in the Settings.php and then used by the associated scripts.
For example, setting your NOAA zone in Settings.php causes that Zone to be used for the backup forecast and the advisories.
The latitude/longitude in Settings.php is used by the UV forecast and Earthquake scripts.
Don’t be afraid of PHP … it’s just a scripting language that runs on the webserver, and it’s output is HTML or images that are sent to the browser for rendering and display.
There’s lots of folks on the forum here who are ready and willing to help you in your learning experience … we’ve all been there
thanks ken! till I get the time to really pour through the PHP stuff, I’ve gone ahead and applied the CSS code to my existing site. it looks fairly good too.
a couple of things are wacky though. on the nav menu, the text for the page you’re currently on is black, making it hard to see. I’ve tried to change that in several places and several ways with no luck.
also, when you look at the homepage in FF3, it looks exactly as it should. but in IE7 the content is all shoved left. it’s the only page that happens on.
and, if I wanted to take the content on the few plain HTML pages I have and make it look like the rest of the site, would I be correct in taking that code and putting it in a “dummy” page made from a template of one of the real pages?
thanks for all the help so far. I think I’ve got it all under control. check it out at njvoorheesweather.com.
there’s one more thing I’d like to do that I’m having trouble getting going. I’d like to have the text of three metars show up on a page. WD is all set up and is currently uploading the texts once per hour. the code I’m using to get them on the page is as follows:
<div id="main-copy">
The Voorhees Weather Station Area Metars from the National Weather Service
Philadelphia International Airport
%metar/report=%@@@Metar_station_code_2.MET
NWS FO, Mount Holly, NJ
%metar/report=%@@@Metar_station_code_1.MET
Atlantic City International Airport
%metar/report=%@@@Metar_station_code_3.MET
</div>
you can see the result at njvoorheesweather.com/wx13.html. I’m trying to use the code that WD’s default page uses, but I know I’ve got something screwed up in the code–I know so little of what I’m doing.
I tried to search for the answer with no luck. can anybody point me in the right direction?
