Chris Newton wrote:
Hi Everyone
Quick intro, I am a FED been developing with DNN off and on for 6 years and its nice to see the advances that have been made but templating for the platform has needless road blocks that I wanted to bring up to the devs to help make skinning and templating better for the future.
1. I understand its a front facing cms but the css required for admin area should only be loaded when logged in.
This file is hell as a FED /Resources/Shared/stylesheets/dnndefault/7.0.0/default.css it has a healthy mix of global styles and dnn specific styles required to run the admin area. I recommend using 0 global styles e.g.
ol, ul {
list-style: none;
}
I want ol and uls in my content which means im overwriting styles over and over and over again to achieve what I want. At the very least I recommend a BEM approach with dnn specific prefixes so that we know we wont ever collide or need to overwrite styles.
2. I think its great that you offer a blank template at install but blank isnt really blank, there is still a lot of boiler plate and uses the xcillion theme. I recommend that for devs that are experienced with the set up an actual blank slate with no template, pages, extras would be a good option.
3. Offer a system out of the box for a build system similar to laravels mix scripts. The idea behind this would be to make build and minification easier for back end devs less familiar with build tools.
Thats it.
Good luck everyone and I hope we can work together to remove road blocks for FED's!
Chris
1. What you see under 1 is a CSS (meyer) reset, but they are also set later in the file, so you should see a style.
One can question if DNN should load a CSS reset, but it's not uncommon for a CMS to do that.
I do agree default.css could be improved, but I don't see this specific issue.
2. I don't understand what you mean, IMO Xcillion is already pretty basic (?)
What are you after exactly? BTW, you cannot have a Portal without a theme.
If you want you can download, create or install your own and create your own site template for new portals if you want.
3. The problem is that as soon as you choose a build system, people will start complain you choose the wrong one. :-)
For Theme packaging / minification anybody can choose their own system and DNN has CSS minifaction and combining as an option built in.
There is a nice Gulp example; nvQuickTheme BTW
HTH Timo