Open Realty Dreamweaver Template Design Extension

Posted on August 19, 2007
Filed Under Design | Leave a Comment

Still a part of the Rapid Template Design Series I’m updating the shopping cart part of this site for the free download of 3 of my extensions for Dreamweaver.

3 extensions that are currently available;
Open Realty 2.4+ Dreamweaver Template Design Extension
WordPress 2.2+ Dreamweaver Template Design Extension
Joomla 1.0.12 (13) Dreamweaver Template Design Extension

Pending testing and release are the following;
Joomla 1.5 Dreamweaver Template Design Extension
vBulletin 3.7 Dreamweaver Template Design Extension
CRE Loaded - osCommerce Dreamweaver Template Design Extension

Some additional options are available in the shopping cart at time of ordering. Some of those options are as follows;

1) Flash Video Tutorials: basically these tutorials cover the use of each extension that goes beyond the documentation

2) Example Pack 1: which includes example master elements and foundations as examples for your review.

3) Example Pack 2: includes the base back along with some drop in elements like menu sets and sample style guides. A full list will be published when all these items are made available the last week of August.

4) Source Code: includes source code for items that have and offer that option such as our Open Realty Page Turn Gallery and the Advertising Page Turn Effect. Both of these examples are Adobe Flash items and are rather involved.

5) Developer License: Only on three items at this point sorry, all other items licensed on a per domain basis. Dreamweaver extensions are the only items not specific to a domain. Additionally the three items that do offer developer licenses are the Flash Items, the SEO tools, and the Menu generator when it comes available.

For questions or availability please use the contact form to send me an email.

Rapid Template Design Kit (Photoshop CS2)

Posted on August 19, 2007
Filed Under Products | Leave a Comment

Photoshop Tutorials - Template Design Kit

The Rapid Template Design Series has been my pet project for just shy of three years and now that were close a few small changes have surfaced.

I love surprises and I don’t mind opposition or competition but some times things leave me scratching my head wondering the logic behind some peoples decisions. None the less it looks as if the company we originally selected as the publisher of the course ware apparently can’t get the distributors to agree on our pricing requirements so we may end up self publishing.

Self publishing isn’t anything at all new since its my guestimate that 95% of all web design related courses on the web are self published. Without revealing to much about the project I’ll just briefly say that the cost to publish the font guide, the color theory materials and the other elements isn’t cheap by any means. Our investment to date is nothing shy of a chunk of change. That lent a great deal to the canceling of some private label software that was to be included in the course. So where are we?

CSS Menu Generator Software - CSS Tabs - CSS Cascading Menu

The software I intended on including with the course was developed by a French company and distributed freely which in all honesty I’d love to still use it. It was to be private labeled to fit our course ware, but two little hurdles became major issues with my partners forcing me to decide on a new selection.

What will be included before we self publish is a ground up Windows based application designed for generating CSS Navigation but will feature two very important features that I feel are essential. The first being that you the design student can add your own code elements using an easy to follow XML diagram that will give you your own generator abilities for your custom menus. The next key feature is the browser compatibility checker. IE for Mac is a dead stick and so is IE5 for Windows so these will be excluded from the generator. IE6, the troublesome browser that it is will still be in the checker.

Next on the list is the font program. It looks like the company we have been asking for a private label from has decided that we can distribute their freely available copy as we choose but they declined the proposal to private label the application.

Dreamweaver MXI / MXP Extensions for Template Design

Ok, my favorite part of this entire series is the MXI / MXP Dreamweaver Extensions. I’ve long been a fan of Dreamweaver and the fact that students can buy a student version for $90 in the school bookstore makes it the ideal target for this instructional series. Now as you may have read previously, there are tutorials and introduction videos for applications such as HTML Kit (Freely available) and Adobe GoLive (could be a product of the past very soon) but Dreamweaver is the choice of more designers than any other application on the Windows platform. I’d love to produce HTML Kit versions of these extensions but its not on the top priority list as of yet.

To help fund the project Mark suggested that we release the 5 Dreamweaver Extensions for $5 a piece outside of the RTDS. I’m opposed to the idea for very simple reason. The biggest is the fact that these extensions are currently for FREE applications like WordPress or Open-Realty and it would more beneficial to release them as donation-ware. Not an obligated to donate type release but a freely donate if you feel they are worth it. My current documentation is a sparse crappy little txt file that I will eventually update to the courses existing documentation format.

I’ll just release the following Dreamweaver Extensions.

    FREE DreamWeaver Template Extensions

  • Open Realty Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
  • Joomla 1.5 Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
  • Joomla 1.0.+ Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
  • WordPress 2.2+ Template Design Dreamweaver Extension
  • CRE Loaded - osCommerce Template Design Dreamweaver Extension (its for both apps)
  • vBulletin 3.7 Template Design Dreamweaver Extension (not yet in development)

Rapid Template Design Series Release Date

Joomla 1.5 is on its way to being a reality, Open Realty is actively developed by Ryan and his coders and WordPress is a work of art always being updated. All that being said the RTDS must be released this fall quarter because much of the thousands of dollars we have invested are for these applications as they stand now. As in NOW! The above mentioned applications could change enough in the next year to render our existing work useless so time is of the essence and I’ll keep the components of the RTDS upgraded as we go.

Thus the date of the release will still be September (months end) but could be pushed by just a few weeks into October. The release price is yet pending on the publishers final word but we believe it will be as originally announced.

Owners of the RTDS will have never expiring unlimited update access on the products main domain and as updates in course materials or components are made available. THERE COULD BE a fee for shipping some updates as we have mentioned this course is initially delivered to you on a single DVD or 4 CD ROMS along with the printed guides. Supplementals will be PDF docs that can be printed locally.

PHP Snippet Inventory - Rapid Template Design Series Code Inventory

CANCELED! Not going to include the code archive as I originally wanted. It was an after thought to add it in the first place but after taking a tenth pass at the checklist for the components we plan to include we feel it really does very little to the courses central theme. The Rapid Template Design Series is simply a PhotoShop course on all the facets of the design process and techniques related to web and print publishing design. All the other stuff was an after thought designed or included to aid in the learning process. Remember this course is for students not experts of design so we have removed the snippets.

The web design PHP and other coding snippets will however be in a members area of http://www.templatedesignkit.com The nice thing about doing it this way is that we intend on allowing other coders to have free ONE WAY LINKS to their sites from any number of our PR1 - PR4 sites for providing contributed code snippets. Some of the code snippets will be on front street with accommodating articles and or tutorials.

Open Realty Tabbed Navigation

Posted on August 7, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News, Template Design Kit | Leave a Comment

Tabbed Navigation for Open Realty Templates

People like tabs, they like cascading menus and they like clean styled well organized navigation structures. Using tabs for navigation isn’t all to difficult to do for most things as the markup is widely available and easily implemented. One of my favorite of all tabbed type navigation examples is the one published by A List Apart called Sliding Doors A great static tab set with styling for active states for a satisfying effect. But what if you want to use that same tab set in a dynamic environment where tab and or navigation states are all template based. Meaning the navigation elements are not controlled by the database as they are in say Joomla or other applications. Well I needed an answer to that as well having a serious desire to make a tabbed template for CRE Loaded Pro and here is what we did.

Open Realty and Sliding Doors Tab Navigation

Using a static type navigation set like the sliding doors example is that one particular feature of the tabs for active page isn’t exactly a stock feature in Open Realty. Because of this, I recently took a contribution I released last month for CRE Loaded and converted it to work with Open Realty in a no nonsense kind of way that is exceptionally easy to embrace providing a few of your ducks are in a row and you have properly configured your Open Realty installation.

What I’ve done is simple. I take a small chunk of PHP code and determine the URL of the pages I have matched to my tabs and then dynamically set the active state of that particular tab based on an array. Did I lose you? Well here it is in bare bones basic terms.

If you have a tab set with links like Home, About Us, Contact, etc… and you want the active tab to show active when on the about.html page or any other for that matter then when we edit the tab control file by adding the target landing page to the array and then add the link in the tab and your done. Could it get any simpler?

This little technique then gives you the ability to have a nice active state for pages in a templated environment like Open Realty. I’ve used it with other template engines where pages and or active link options are not provided by the application as you can see in the IDX example HERE. When you download the example or visit the site example you can see that the tabs are set to active on each appropriate page. Before you say big deal dude, how is that a challenge, take and download the sliding doors example from A List Apart and examine the code yourself. This solution will not rock the world but it sure does make an Open Realty template shine with a design that can accommodate a nice tabbed navigation.

You can find the tabs example and basic Open Realty template in the tutorials section of TBE.

Best regards.

CRE Loaded Catalog Images

Posted on August 7, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News, Template Design Kit | 1 Comment

CRE Loaded Thumbnail Generator

Nothing is more annoying than seeing or hearing about the frustration end users and site owners have with their site after spending a lofty chunk on its development. Although some things are certain to surface almost routinely, many things can be avoided by taking the time to draft well written and clear documentation.

In CRE Loaded projects I almost always provide site owners with a style guide if I have the slightest idea that he / she intend on using the content page features in the cart. Now, all though CRE Loaded comes with a WYSIWYG editor for product listings, it does not come with a logical explanation on how to use it effectively and therein lies the problem I face quite frequently with end users.

CRE Loaded unlike osCommerce provides a way for store owners to add content in a more rich and controlled format, thats the good part. But Its been my long held suggestion to end users to do their publishing of content offline in a professional html editor (commercial or not) primarily because online editors fill your drafts with countless inline elements that can break a layout. In every single one of my commercial sites, I draft the content in MS Word so I can port a version of my article to a PDF and MS Reader for downloads and then I copy that article into Dreamweaver, clean up the messy MS Word markup, validating the structure, then pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in HTML format. As you can guess my blog is NOT one of those places I do this at. Nothing here validates. (proof positive on another experiment I’ll tell you about later)

Pictures and Content Break My Layout!

So, in CRE Loaded projects and templates I’ve always provided the client with a simple one page sheet on the correct image sizes and a small collection of examples among other things for the editor. In the last month alone I’ve seen only 1 person use a CRE Loaded design I’ve built correctly. Thumbnail images are consistent in size, the popup images are all the same size and product images are all the same size. Its when people try to upload these gigantic images in hopes that they will be sized correctly that problems begin.

Because of this I’ve had the php guy build me three little CRE Loaded generators that I’m publishing free of charge for your use. The main one is a simple image generator that takes the product photo and produces three output sizes based on user variables for either width or height. It will add a nice little user defined prefix to the image and provide some other features that will help CRE store owners to quickly generate consistent photo sizes without the lengthy process of producing them in photoshop.

I’ll write more on this generator and the content validation generators later in the week. Until then, blog like a mad man.

« go back

TEMP CODE: GDHXCDX17249629
Close
E-mail It