how to personalise your site

This page is under construction.

This explains how to change the appearance of your site:

• how to change the colours;
• how to add a background image;
• how to change the appearance of the menu;
• how to add pages;
• how to change the overall shape of the site.

There are several places in the menu (under site management) that you can find these features:

• personalise your site
• edit the menu
• edit the page structure
• summary: where to change what

skins

A 'skin' is a collection of settings which give your web site a different appearance. If you change the skin, all the settings change. You can change the skin on personalise your site > skins. You can create a new skin by cloning an existing one; then you can make changes to the new skin.

The software always has at least two skins: the default skin and the as delivered skin. The default skin is the most basic skin; it has the properties of the underlying software. The as delivered skin is the base skin for this particular web site or the group of web sites of which this web site is a particular case. There may be further skins; if so, they will based on the as delivered skin.

how to change a colour

There are many places where you can set a colour (of text or a background). They all work in the same way: first you select the colour type, then you set the colour value. This means that you can set a colour in several ways (by colour type):

• hexadecimal colours, specified as a hex number;
• transparent, which means what it says - it has no colour;
• RGB colours, specified as RGB(r, g, b) for the three colours red, green, blue, where r, g, b are numbers from 0 to 255.;
• RGBA colours, specified as RGB(r, g, b, o) as for RGB and o is opacity (between 0 and 1.0);
• HSL colours, specified as HSL(h, s, l) for hue, saturation, and lightness, where hue is 0-360; saturation is a percentage, and lightness is a percentage;
• HSLA colours, specified as HSLA(h, s, l, o) as HSL plus o for opacity (as in RGBA);
• 147 color names which you can choose from here.

When ever you change the colour type, the page will redraw with a new sample colour in the colour box.

how to add a background image

This can be done for the site as a whole and for a menu item.

Take the site background image as an example. See the personalise your site > skins menu. See more information here.

There you will see various settings entitled 'for the site background...'. The top two (colour type, #ffffff) are to set the colour of the site background. The next four are to set an image:

• images/blank.gif
  This is a url to the image file you want to use. Normally, it will simply be a path and filename within your web site (such as 'images/blank.gif').
• repeat
  This determines whether or not the image is repeated across the site. 'repeat-x' causes it to be repeated horizontally; the size of the basic 'tile' will be determined by the image size. 'repeat-y' is analagous to 'repeat-x' but is repeated vertically. 'repeat' is repeated both horizontally and vertically. 'no-repeat' is shown once and is not repeated.
• 'scroll'
  The background image scrolls with the rest of the page. If this is set to 'fixed, the background image is fixed.
• 'center top'
  The background-position property sets the starting position of a background image. This can have a number of values; the default is 'center top'.

how to change the appearance of the menu

There are two aspects to this: what set of menu items do you need to show; what should the menu look like.

what should the menu look like

This is done via the menu: site management > personalise your site > menu.

This enables you to change the shape, size, relative positions, colour, background image, and borders of the menu items. You can select a different appearance for different levels of the menu, and for whether the mouse is or is not over the menu item. There is a lot of flexibility to design a menu scheme, and the input system has been designed to make it as error-free as possible. The result is that there what seems to be a daunting amount of data that you might want to input and change; but, on the whole, setting up a new menu scheme can be done quite easily. It is helped by there being a sample menu on the input form which allows you to see the effect of changes before committing to bthe proper menu. You update the changes by means of the edit the menu menu item.

what set of menu items do you need to show

This is done via the menu : site management > edit the menu.

This enables you to create new menu items, move menu items around, and to provide details like their titles and where they link to.

You can choose whether to have the same menu for all skins, or you can have a different menu for each skin. You make this selection on the edit the menu page.

how to add pages

This is done via the menu: site management > edit the page structure.

Each page has two main properties: its page name, and the name of the file in which its program code resides. The latter may sometimes not exist, the page name always does. When creating a new page, you supply these two pieces of information. This creates a new page, and you can then provide the further details as required.

The page name should desirably be of the form Unn where nn is a number in the series 00 to 99. Always start with U for user-created pages.

There are tooltips on the detailed items on the form which should explain the data that are required.

If a new page is created, it will generally need to be added to the menus somewhere, otherwise there will be no way to access it. This is achieved by changing the menu structure - see above.

how to change the overall shape of the site

This is done via the menu: site management > change the page geometry.

The overall geometry of a page is called its layout. There is 'default layout' which comes with the site. You can create further layouts (up to 99). All the data are stored in the database.

Layouts differ by (for example): having different numbers of columns; having their menus on the left, or as a bar under the header.

A layout is based on a layout base, which is one of the standard layouts, but which you can modify (eg: change a column width).

summary: where to change what

how to add a background image (for the site as a whole) and for a menu item)

See the site management > personalise your site > skins menu.

how to add a background image (for a menu item)

See the site management > personalise your site > menu menu.

to change the menu items to show

See the site management > edit the menu menu.

to add pages

See the site management > edit the page structure menu.

how to change the overall shape of the site

See the site management > change the page geometry menu.

NB: you can't change the settings for the 'default' skin or the 'as delivered' skin.