Creative Web Specialist - An online portfolio and resource site of Warren Buckley

I create sexy websites

Welcome to the home of Warren Buckley's blog a
Creative Web Specialist, who works mainly with Opensource .NET CMS Umbraco to create clean sexy websites that are content managed.

This blog is mainly used for my own perosnal web snippets and things I learn along the way when using Umbraco, but if you find anything useful to read whilst you here then great!

Welcome to Creative Web Specialist - enjoy

Latest Posts

Hello all,
Well this is a quick blog post to let you know I have made a minor path update to the Creative Website package, which creates the Assets folder in the “Data” folder located at the Root as opposed to having the “Assets” folder in the root because of people reporting permission issues with this and the JS folder has been moved to the NEW “Scripts” folder in V3 of umbraco.

Well once I am more settled I plan to look at the Umbraco forums and keep up with all the blog posts - but this will now be out of office hours because my current position does not use Umbraco at the new company where I work.

Hello all,
I have updated the package from Douglas Robar’s feedback with XSLT Search 2.0 not being configured correctly.

With this update I would like to annouce that this package is now live in the NEW v3 umbraco repository. So you can download this website package right inside umbraco.

Keep your eyes peeled - as plans are for a Website Package with a CSS Switcher and theme gallery.

Hello all,
This post will be brief and to the point. I have updated the Creative Website Wizard for umbraco with a minor update.

This update includes Douglas Robar’s XSLT Search version 2.0 which now works with umbraco V3- “hurrah I hear you cry!”

Author
Warren Buckley

Hello all,
Well hopefully this will be a useful solution to the Umbraco CMS community. I have worked on a CSS style switcher that allows the user to change the look of your site with a different CSS stylesheet. For example you may have two coloured themes that you want your user to be able to decide which they want to use when browsing your site.

This solution requires two files, a VB.NET usercontrol and an XSLT file.

The VB.NET file checks if the style querystring exists if so it creates the cookie of StyleSwitch with the value from the style querystring otherwise it sets a default value. If your intrested take a look at the code in usercontrol, it is heavily commented and should be easy to understand.

The XSLT does the important part of loading the correct stylesheet depending on the cookie value. Using an XSL:Choose statement with the umbraco.library we are able to read the cookie value and load diffferent stylesheets depending on the cookie value.

This solution is very flexible as it is also possible to load in different JavaScript files as well to compliment the CSS stylesheets. For example I plan to use this style switcher in a future release of my Creative Website Wizard Package for Umbraco to load in different layouts and themes. However just simply changing the CSS will not change the font colour used in sIFR3 as this is set with a JavaScript config file. So I will need to load a new JavaScript file along with the CSS file when doing the theme switches.

Author
Warren Buckley
Categories

Hello all,

This blog post is for my own reference mainly for a technique I have read and learnt about. What I was looking for was to be able to style alternative rows a different colour, similar to the popular layout of iTunes where the row colour alternates between dark and light blue.

I wanted to be able to achieve this affect easily without having to add Classes to my table for each different row manually, I wanted this to be automatic so it can be used in CMS systems without the end user having to ammend the HTML code on the table. I know that in the future we will not have to use JavaScript to help us do this as the new CSS3 selectors will allow us to do this.

This is the CSS rule that will be used in the future and will obviously style all odd table rows with the background colour red.

My Skill Set

This is a quick list of my skill set to date

  • XHTML
  • CSS
  • Photoshop (Slicing)
  • XSLT
  • ASP.NET
  • Umbraco .NET CMS

My Last.FM

I am listening to:

  • Coming January 2009 - The Ricky Gervais Guide To... Natural History by Ricky Gervais7 Jan 2009, 13:02
  • As Heard On Radio Soulwax - Pt 6 by 2 Many DJ's7 Jan 2009, 11:40
  • As Heard On Radio Soulwax - Part 5 by 2 Many DJ's7 Jan 2009, 10:34

My Flickr

Check out all my pics from flickr

Warren Buckley is an umbraco MVP 2008/2009 Warren Buckley is an umbraco level 1 certified developer

Photo of Warren Buckley Warren Buckley is a Creative Web Specialist based in Leigh on Sea, Essex , UK.