Rapid Template Design Kit (Photoshop CS2)

Posted on August 19, 2007
Filed Under Products |

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.

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