The In's and Out's to Xaraya Theme Building
The In's and Out's to Xaraya Theme Building
Over two years have past since I last wrote a full fledge tutorial on theme building. Many things have changed, while many things have stayed the same. Whether you use PHP-Nuke, PostNuke, or Xaraya, you are still using the tool of the lazy webmaster. Guess what, things haven't changed, its quite OK to be lazy. You should be more worried about you content rather than the technology that the content is being displayed on. The underlying layer is unimportant, its the content and the presentation that matters.
That being said, Xaraya allows the greatest bang for the buck for us lazy folks. Template building in Xaraya is not complex, nor should it be very intimidating. Its basically going back to the old days of using an editor to create a container for content. All of the PHP work is done for you. Now it's just a matter of producing the layout and the presentation layer that makes you happy.
The purpose of this tutorial is two fold. First, I want to introduce some very important concepts with the BlockLayout and Xaraya. Second, I want you, the reader, to begin to understand the scope of BlockLayout and the possibilities that you now have to think outside of the box. This is the main goal with this tutorial. Instead of which was the main goal with the PHP-Nuke theme tutorial.
A few answers to some common questions (notes) before we get started.
You are an expert at PHP, how am I suppose to learn this?. To begin with, I am not an expert at PHP. I still consider myself a real amateur hack. I have had the privilege of working with some real gifted folks over the past couple of years, but unfortunately their talent has not rubbed off on me. For the purposes of this tutorial, you need to know the basics behind programming concepts, as well as be comfortable with HTML. That said, this tutorial is designed to be as simple to read as it is to implement in a real world setting.
Are you happy with your site and your modifications?. I am never really happy with my site. I just enjoy learning, and playing. I look at the diner as my hobby, and I enjoy changing it from time to time. I'll let you in on a little secret, this current design took me 30 minutes to rough out, and about 4 hours of tweaking to get it where it is today.
Why the hell are you writing this?. As I said before, I want to teach the basic concepts of Block Layout, remove the mystery behind it, and have a little fun burning the rust off my writing skills. I also want people to think about the ease of creating a theme so that maybe we can all have some awe inspiring designs to look at. The downfall of any portal system is that they all look the same. What's worse is, most portal systems share common attributes that allow them to look just like one another. Can you tell a GeekLog site from a PostNuke site at first glance? I have problems recognizing Drupal from the crowd any more (no offense to the Drupal bunch, they do a great job). Lets all make a pledge to get away from the three column / one header / one footer look that has taken over the web.
Hence the Xaraya Theme Building Tutorial. Enjoy the read, and ignore my rants if you like.