Manila themes and CSS

Manila themes and CSS

I'm creating some new themes for the Government's intranet. 20 of them. Valentines. St David's day. Christmas. Eid Al-Addha. You know, all the most important holidays.

I'm starting from scratch. Trying to have very little HTML and do most of it with XHTML and style sheets.

Once I have a layout that I'm happy with, I can very quickly alter the stylesheet, or the arrangement of the columns and produce 20 different designs with basically the same structure. Kinda like the CSS Zen Garden, only without the switcher. The intranet has 30 odd micros sites (Manila sites) and the IT geezer wants to 'one click' swap themes for the entire installation. People will still be able to use the Editors' only: Prefs: Appearance, to change background and link colours — I'm still using the body macro.

Each site will be fully loaded, with all the usual macros plus:

• searchThisSite
• alteredUserland.siteMenu: a Windows Explorer view of the hierarchy
  
• lastUpdate
• alteredUserland.newsDeptLinks: links with XML buttons to news departments
  
• recentNewsItems
• displayLastUpdatedHomePagesCSS
• printFriendlyLink
• mailStory
  
• xmlCoffeeMug
• rssLink
• viewRssBoxCSS
• alteredUserland.mailToLink: a mail to: member's name with envelope icon

I may add some CSS tool tips as well. Maybe a monthly archive macro too, and I have been thinking about doing a print CSS but if it takes as long to do a screen CSS then I think I'll stick with the print friendly template.

Currently, I'm ripping out the discussion group theme. Still has to be an HTML table but much simpler, whilst giving more power to the CSS.

I'll remove the non UserLand macros and add in modules instead of the includeMessage and release them to the community when they're finished.