HTML Generation - Own Template

[Chris Galvin]

Chris,

This may be a dumb question but I have my own website and wish to use BB Pro and the HTML Generator as a quick method of generating new pages. I am not particularly tech-savvy when it comes to page generation but I would like to use the CSS sheet from my website in BB Pro, so as to produce pages in exactly the same style as my site. Is this possible and if so how could I do it. ~Please be gentle with me and talk in Ladybird book 1 style

Cheers

Chris Galvin
Chris Galvin Photo (http://chrisgalvinphoto.com/latest9.htm)

[DavidB]

This is certainly possible, but a lot will depend on which template you want to start from and what exactly your CSS sheet does.

Firstly, advice to read the manual always seems unfriendly, but in this case you do need to read (and possibly re-read) the help page on HTML templates. Secondly, you need to get a book on HTML and CSS that you are comfortable with, if you haven't got one already. You'll be very lucky indeed if things work first time, and you need resources to help you figure out what the problem is.

You also need an application in which you can edit HTML. At one end of the spectrum there is Notepad; at the other you have applications like Dreamweaver, which are expensive and a major learning curve in their own right. In between, you could use the freeware Notepad++ (which is still only a text editor, but has a tabbed interface for editing multiple files and highlights HTML syntax), or a shareware application like CoffeeCup (which has WYSIWIG capabilities, but is still, essentially, an editor).

With your resources in place, I'd use BB Pro to generate a trial gallery, probably with no more than a couple of images. I would then edit the generated code of this gallery (index and image pages) to use your CSS sheet. If it's a fairly simple style sheet, this should be straightforward, but if the CSS places lots of elements on the page, you will need to experiment to get the code produced by BB Pro to work with your style sheet.

Once you can make your style sheet work with BB Pro generated HTML, you should have a pretty clear idea how you need to change the BB Pro template. This is where the guidance in the help file comes in. Essentially, you save a copy of your starting template folder (with a name that becomes the name of your new template) in the same location as the original, and you edit the template files in accordance with the guidance, to incorporate the changes you have identified during your experiments with the generated files. You will need to compare the template files and the corresponding generated HTML to work out where things fit. Again, the ease with which you can do this will depend on the complexity of your template. Expect a fair amount of trial and error.

One point to be aware of is that the generated code, including for example the thumbnails on the index page, does include some JavaScript. Unless you want another learning curve, you should leave this alone if at all possible, though you may need to adjust the positioning of elements on the page that is set in the script. You might then need to understand how style cascading (the 'C' of CSS) works.

I hope this helps, even though, without pictures, it's not really up to Ladybird Book standards.

[Chris Galvin]

Cheers David, and thanks for that reply. Whilst I would never consider myself an expert I do know a little of what needs to be done and your reply helps a great deal. Especially when considering the help page and manual, basic I know but I really only use BB Pro for browsing and raw conversion. My site is a template that I bought, converted and edited the HTML and javascripts in notepad. It was very much a work in progress for a while till the site was ready and a rapid learning curve starting from zero. However I like the basic way that it looks.

Chris Galvin
Chris Galvin Photo (http://chrisgalvinphoto.com)

[DavidB]

I really only use BB Pro for browsing and raw conversion.Some of the other things it does - metadata, batch renaming, extraction of JPEGs from RAW files, as well as linking to your editor with a single keystoke, are very well worth trying. They make my life a lot easier, anyway.

My site is a template that I bought, converted and edited the HTML and javascripts in notepad.If you like Notepad, you'll like Notepad++ more. It is very useful to tab from one open file to another when you are working on HTML. And syntax highlighting makes life that bit easier as well.

However I like the basic way that it looks.So do I, very much. Clean and clear, with a strong focus on the images. Where did you buy the template, as a matter of interest? Or did you have it made?

[Chris Galvin]

So do I, very much. Clean and clear, with a strong focus on the images. Where did you buy the template, as a matter of interest? Or did you have it made?

I bought the template from a company in Chicago USA called Allwebco Link Here (http://www.allwebcodesign.com/setup/templates.htm)

Cheers

Chris Galvin
Chris Galvin Photo (http://chrisgalvinphoto.com)

[DavidB]

Thanks very much. The Allwebco templates appear to be well suited to your purpose, as they are well annotated, and it is clear which bit of the page does what.

In those circumstances, an alternative approach to the one I suggested might be still to start with the generated gallery (so as to learn how the BB Pro template works), but then build your BB Pro template from one of the AllWebco gallery templates, by removing Allwebco elements, replacing them with BB Pro elements, and naming the files as required by BB Pro.