In order to submit a drupal module, you must adhere to Drupal's coding standards. The problem with the coding standards, is that it has one specific and very annoying standard: indenting. I absolutely hate that the indenting is:
Use an indent of 2 spaces, with no tabs.
If it was 4, then I could live with it. Is there any way to go about convincing Drupal to change these standards, or at the very least, is there a way others deal with this? Perhaps a Netbeans plugin that shows single spaces as double or something similar?
No one is going to change Drupal's coding standards.
You can write your code in your style but before submitting it, you can just "autoformat" all the code (Alt + Shift + F) with the Drupal coding standards which can be configured at: Tools -> Options -> Editor.
Related
I use Visual Studio as my development environment, and tab indentation is 4, but after I commit to Google Code, the indentation is 8 in the browser, which makes my code look ugly.
Does anyone know how to reset the tab indentation to 4 when looking at it in web browser?
Apparently this is not supported. This enhancement request was filed nearly 5 years ago, and is still marked as "won't fix":
If you rely on tabs to be some width other than 8 spaces for your code to be
formatted correctly, then other contributors will have trouble reading your code. If
you do prefer hard tabs, it's good practice to use spaces (not tabs) for any
formatting/alignment other than plain indentation: that way, your code will look all
right no matter what the tab width.
I don't see us taking action on this in the foreseeable future: it would be adding
complexity to project administration to enable something that really isn't such a
great idea anyway.
–artdent
So it looks like you are out of luck. I guess that's what you get for using tabs instead of spaces. Tabs require far too much support from the editor, and high quality editors are sadly still not ubiquitous.
It is trivial to configure Visual Studio to use spaces everywhere instead of tabs, including when you press the Tab key:
Tools → Options → Text Editor → <language> → Tabs → Insert Spaces
If you don't want to use spaces everywhere, you could set up your source control system to convert tabs to spaces when you commit code, and convert the spaces back to tabs when you check out. Sounds like a lot of effort just to work around the limitations of one of your tools, but it wouldn't be that hard in practice once you got it set up.
I've got a prospect whose site was just built, but the forms don't work. The forms seem to be using a DW Extension. We don't build in DW, so I'm not familiar with how it works. If a site is built in DW, is it limited to only DW-related fixes/solutions?
Dreamweaver is just a GUI for designing and developing HTML (etc;) pages, sites.
Many devs actually utilize nothing more than an enhanced Notepad application (like Notepad++). Personally I consider Dreamweaver a crutch for people that develop in it from day 1, you take it away and they don't know anything because they rely on the program. Which is fine for most work until they run into issue where they have to solve a problem themselves.
I don't hate dreamweaver, I just don't use it as my Notepad++ is sufficient for all my PHP, HTML, CSS, JSP, etc dev
Extension
You probably mean, a javascript library of some sort to validate the forms? If so you could gut those out (or keep them) and use jQuery, or anything you are comfy with.
Yes, absolutely. Once Dreamweaver generates the code anyone who is familiar with whatever language it is in can work on the file. Dreamweaver itself is not required for anything, but if you do use it you can take advantage of the wizards and what not.
But any text editor can edit pages generated by WP.
One note of caution: DW uses regular expressions to check its code and look for patterns that correspond to the various wizards. If you edit the code, it may break that check and the behavior will no longer appear in the appropriate panel. Everything will still work fine but you will no longer be able to edit via wizards.
Suppose you're developing a web site and blind users will be a significant chunk of your target market. If the web site includes document editing functionality, what would be appropriate WYSIWYM tools? Are languages like Markdown, Textile and Wiki Formatting really accessible or are they inconvenient to blind users?
I'm a blind programmer and while I haven't used most of the languages you mention I've found that any markdown language is fairly easy to use if you have the desire to learn it. I've had no problem using either HTML or several markup languages for wiki's. Part of it will depend on how invested the users are in your site. If it's a site that will be visited infrequently or for short periods of time, it's much less likely that a user will take the time to learn the required markup whether they are blind or not. Unfortunately, I have not found an accessible JavaScript WYSIWYG editor but I find it easier to manually enter the markup so haven't looked very hard.
the first question is: how important is semantic structure? could you get away with plain text. You could do simple parsing like treating blank lines as paragraph markers, treating a series of lines which begin with * as a bulleted list, identify URLs and make them into links, etc.
As a blind developer myself, I have no problem in understanding languages like Markdown. But if it's a syntax I'm unfamiliar with, I'll only learn it if I expect to use the site very often, or care deeply about the content.
Two final thoughts come to mind: while I certainly experience some accessibility challenges using TinyMCE, you could develop something much simpler - provide less than 10 formatting options, like inserting hyperlinks, making lists, centering text, setting the style (such as heading) etc.
And lastly, when I talk to non-technical blind people, they often just write their content in Word and paste into a wiki or blog post. This sounded strange when I first heard it, but it does make sense. So an ideal solution would accept pasted in content.
In closing - it depends how important this is, and how much effort you want to expend. Maybe a Markdown editor with a live preview (like on this site), buttons for inserting simple formatting like URLs, and the ability to paste in rich text would tick all boxes :-)
On a web page, the most accessible embedded text editor for blind users is one that uses standard HTML, such as a <textarea> element, with a corresponding <label> element:
<label for="editor">Enter your text here using wiki markup:</label>
<textarea id="editor"></textarea>
If a WYSIWYM tool is built using standard accessible HTML, then blind users can easily enter text into it, with full confidence that they're entering text in the right place. Then the question becomes: Which is the better markup language? They all require memorization, but some may be more intuitive than others. One way to find out which is best would be to do some usability testing with a wide variety of target users. Also be sure to providing easy, accessible access to syntax help.
Picture yourself working in pure text 80x4 display (just open a console and resize appropriately), then use vi/emacs/ed and you'll soon realize what markup will get in the way.
Try to do as much work as possible to understand plain text, else use light markup like POD, finally things like AsciiDoc are very powerful but needs training.
I don't know about WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM tools, but I do know that complying with W3C standards (especially their HTML5 en CSS3 drafts) while writing your own editor code will help a lot.
In CSS you can specify speed and intonation of speech. In HTML you can specify alternative text (alt attribute in many elements) that screen readers are compatible with. Be sure to know when to use the abbr and the acronym elements. Use the former when you want the screen reader to read the meaning of an abbreviation and the latter when the acronym should be read as a word (e.g. ASAP, NATO and OS).
For the editor itself, I recommend creating a WYSIWYG editor that uses divs and spans. Screen readers will understand easily the structure of a document. For the current line, use a text box; for every other line that's not being edited, convert the contents immediately to valid HTML.
If you find a good tool, be sure to post it here. I'm looking for one too. :-)
what is the difference in performance between css templates and dreamweaver templates , or are they the same. Need to know which one gets indexed quicker by google.
I want to move my website to one the best templates for quick uploads and ftp linkups with linkmanagement tools
please advise
thanks
This is why I despise Dreamweaver and the alike...
Dreamweaver creates websites, which consist of HTML and CSS code, and maybe some JavaScript.
HTML: the "glue". It's the structure which browsers read.
CSS: the "perty stuff". It's what browsers read to determine how to make your page look (colors, layout, etc.).
Since Dreamweaver makes websites, a Dreamweaver template also helps Dreamweaver to make websites, which implies that it follows the above structure.
Templates just style your site and might provide some basic functionality, so they have nothing to do with uploads. Some might be bloated and cause slow loading times, but that's dependent upon the template.
In the end, Dreamweaver Template is more or less CSS + HTML.
A DW template file helps to isolate parts of your HTML code on a page/page basis. Editable content and "locked" content together (in hopes of making development quicker). If you like DW, and have a template you like - 0use it. But don't expect that to be your silver bullet.
There's no advantage to either template where search engines are concerned (good/bad content withstanding).
Content...(pertinent content) is what Google is after. Having a 1M file of valid content will beat a 200k file of sparse/bait-n-switch content every time (well, it's supposed to, right?).
The answer you are looking for: Every Dreamweaver template is a CSS+HTML template. So it depends on the CSS template you are using. For the most part Dreamweaver is pretty bad about writing optimal CSS and it also uses inline styles which is bad for performance.
The real answer: It is obvious you are a beginner and don't know how silly your question is, it is not even one question, and is open ended and has no answer. There is no such thing as a CSS template, CSS by itself is not enough to create a template and this is just a marketing word to use to sell templates to people looking for such a thing as a better alternative to HTML templates, and etc, there is CSS for a certain type of template or certain Document Object Model, so if that is your definition of a CSS template than every Dreamweaver Template is a CSS template, as Dreamweaver itself is not a web technology or language. Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG/IDE that helps you to write CSS (and other code) without knowledge of CSS, or in my case I use it because I love the pink/purple syntax highlighting it has for CSS in code view.
*Need to know which one gets indexed quicker by google - FTP Upload - linkmanagement *
This has nothing to do with your question, you can create a website in notepad that gets better SEO results. You are mixing all these different concepts together, SEO, CSS, HTML Templates, google indexing,templates, quick uploads, ftp linkups, linkmanagement tools, these are all different concepts and each require years of experience for you to achieve this. At the end of the day what I am trying to tell you is, building a website as you describe is not a few clicks to create a template with dreamweaver. You first need to learn enough to be able to ask the right questions. And then you will be able to create such a website, not the best and ultimate "templates for quick uploads and ftp linkups with linkmanagement tools" but something that works, even though I'm not sure what exactly you are trying to build.
I Think you should look into a CMS like WordPress and get a nice looking wordpress template for your site and eventually become more familiar with these concepts. WordPress has a really good SEO/(google indexing as you say) that it even gets better results than expensive websites built by professionals. This is definitely what you want! trust me!
http://wordpress.org/
I'm terribly new to web development. I'm trying to make a pretty simple site with a friend. My friend has taken the time to design the layout for our site, and we have things looking how we want in a static HTML page.
What I'd like to do now is move over to a Content Management System like Drupal but keep the same design that we have all ready laid out.
Since I'm completely new to this field, I'm looking for some best-practices advice as to how to make this leap.
It's apparent to me that I could probably edit some existing Drupal Theme to make it give me the layout that I want, but is that the path I should go down?
Thanks!
Update: Also, is it more than just replacing my style.css with their style.css?
Update 2: The end goal is for people to be able to log in and create news entries, very similar to a blog that will then appear on the front page. There will be other items on the left- and right- but they don't need to be directly accessed by anyone, really. They'll stay pretty static.
The Zen theme is sort of a meta-theme that's designed to be fully standards compliant and make pretty much every aspect of theming readily customizable, with lots of informative commenting. It's the best place to start if you want to develop your own theme. Even if you find a theme that looks a lot like the one you want to create, it's probably still better to start with zen because it's extremely well laid out and instructive. That being said, I've never built a theme from scratch, but it sure looks like a lot of work.
Update
In general the best approach will likely end up being to use your designer's HTML and CSS as a reference, and to edit the Zen-based templates and CSS files to recreate that appearance. It's a bit magical.
You will end up breaking the styles used in your designer's layout into chunks that are part of various template files. The mostly-static stuff on the side columns will become what Drupal calls "blocks"; you'll likely use the top part of the page to refine the HTML for the header section of the main page template; and you'll use the central part to add any necessary tags to the content section of the main page template.
I tend to make liberal use of the Firebug extension for Firefox, or the developer tools built into Chrome. These tools let you quickly locate a given CSS element that you want to change, and edit it to see how the change will look. At first though it's probably better to just read through the whole CSS file to get a feel for how it works. Again, Zen's CSS is very easy to digest.
Pour your heart and soul into the Drupal Theming Guide for the next few days. Theming, like most things, is best done if followed by a gratuitous amount of time in the documentation.
Start with either Zen or Framework themes. They provide good starting points for working with the CSS to adapt to your design.
This helps too:
http://drupal.org/theme-guide
Whatever you do, don't take Garland theme as how a good drupal theme is done. I went down that path when I first started Drupal...