Let me tell you a little about my story before proceeding to the main contents of the stuff.
When I was a student on college a company's friend contacted me wishing for a very simple website. I made one using pure html and CSS and a couple of flash banners everyone got satisfied with the results. 3 Years later I work for that company, and on my spare time I decided to give a new look and make it easier to manage the contents (specially here the boss loves new campaigns every only-god-knows time) and changing the menu, and the sidebars started to become a little annoying. At the same time I got involved on linux firewall distro and discovered that it included a module for making web galleries that got my atention. The author mentioned an strange word for me, so I went down to google and found what joomla was.
I decided that it was my best option (my only option I didn't know about open-source CMS's, and I'm not a PHP or any other scripting or server-side languages savyy).
I found several cool templates, saw another word "artisteer" found a demo, and seemed a very nice option, convinced the boss to buy the pro version and I promised I would have a very easy to use and stable website running in a bliss.
WROOOOOOOOOOOOONG!!!!
I felt very disapointed on such cms, It was everything but easy to use, specially the menus and creating content for the editor staff was not very easy, and all the terminology almost cryptic hidden on thousands of page of documentation (believe me I love reading TFM but it was really annoying to follow up with it and all those plugins needed for the most common tasks) that i gave up on it. One day after almost 8 monts without a hope I just googled in frustration: that_CMS_that_i_wont_repeat_its_name sucks.
And voila I found i was not the only one. Then a lot of people talked about several open-source CMS and everything pointed for robustness, support, community, and most of all easy-of-use to CMSMS. I decided to give it a try. And believe me in less than 10 days I had a brand new website up & running. CMSMS it's awesome.
Since I already had Artisteer and I'm not a code expert but i have the logics, I tried to hack the artisteer template to work with cmsms and I Made it (I'm still wondering some stuff, but believe artisteer code on CSS and HTML is at some time very cryptic)
I've seen several people asking for clear and understandable tutorials for converting artisteer templates for CMSMS. And I agree with most of them, the mint-chocolate video is not very clear about it. And artisteer code isn't friendly at all.
I found by accident something about it on Roy porter's blog (I don't know if I'm allowed to post links, If I do notify me, and I update this thread, but for now i won't post the link) It has some clear instructions but it was based on Artisteer Beta V3. Since I use Artisteer 2.2 some of the name on the tags change a lot. Also Artisteer V3 supports Jquery. But it was clearly a good advice.
The only thing that never worked was the menu as it was on that page, It mixed the levels of the elements and the list was kinda limited to 2 levels regardles of depth. So I took the simple css menu template from CMSMS and modified it.
After several trial and error hours and mods, finally I made it work. Be careful when working with this stuff and using mozilla/firefox, is a very nice browser (the one I prefer for all my browsing and debugging needings) but is very permissive with some non-compliant code, so sometimes it worked in firefox but not at all on safari, ie, opera, or chrome.
I recurred to w3c validator and found several flaws on my coding and finally was able to make it to work.
I know it might not be optimal code, since I don't understand some stuff and if someone is savyy enough on cmsms nomenclature and php code please fix it and post it on this forum or on a blog so it is accesible to everyone.
Here is my code (it works with Artisteer 2.2 template on CMSMS 1.9.1)
This code is only for the menu. If you wish to see the whole walthrough for converting templates from Artisteer from CMSMS google
If admins allow me to post the link I'll surely put it.roy porter cmsms artisteer.
Code: Select all
{* CSS classes used in this template:
.currentpage - The active/current page
.bullet_sectionheader - To style section header
hr.separator - To style the ruler for the separator *}
{if $count > 0}
{*<ul class="clearfix">*}
<ul class="art-menu">
{foreach from=$nodelist item=node}
{if $node->depth > $node->prevdepth}
{repeat string="
<ul>
" times=$node->depth-$node->prevdepth}
{elseif $node->depth < $node->prevdepth}
{repeat string="</li></ul>" times=$node->prevdepth-$node->depth}
</li>
{elseif $node->index > 0}
</li>
{/if}
{if $node->current == true} {*ACTIVE for Level 1 non subitem*}
<li>
<a class=" active"
href="{$node->url}">
{if $node->target ne ""} target="{$node->target}"{/if}
{if $node->depth == 1}
<span class="l"></span>
<span class="r"></span>
<span class="t">
{/if}
{$node->menutext}
{if $node->depth == 1}
</span>
{/if}
</a>
{elseif $node->parent == true && $node->depth == 1 and $node->type != 'sectionheader' and $node->type != 'separator'}
<li class=" active"> {*Active when submenu item is selected} *}
<a class=" active" href="{$node->url}">
{if $node->depth == 1} <span class="l"></span><span class="r"></span><span class="t">
{/if}
{if $node->target ne ""} target="{$node->target}"
{/if}
{$node->menutext}
{if $node->depth == 1}</span>
{/if}
</a>
{elseif $node->type == 'sectionheader' }
<li {* class="sectionheader"> *}
{if $node->parent == true && $node->depth == 1 and $node->type == 'sectionheader' and $node->type != 'separator'}
class=" active">
<a class=" active"
{else}
>
<a
{/if}
href="javascript:void()" onclick="return myMethod('test');">
<span class="l"></span><span class="r"></span><span class="t">
{$node->menutext}
</span>
</a>
{elseif $node->type == 'separator'}
<li style="list-style-type: none;">
<hr class="separator" />
{else}
<li><a href="{$node->url}">
{if $node->depth == 1}<span class="l"></span><span class="r"></span><span class="t">{/if}
{if $node->target ne ""} target="{$node->target}"{/if}
{$node->menutext}
{if $node->depth == 1}
</span>
{/if}
</a> {/if}
{/foreach}
{repeat string="</li>
</ul>
" times=$node->depth-1}
</li>
</ul>
{/if} 
) website template that is w3c compliant and can be uploaded asap to the website, some clients don't even understand why pages look good on all browsers but IE and claim that the problem is the page and not the browser, and you can't force the website visitors to use a real browser since a lot of them just think that IE is the one and only. 