CI and CSS...

[eluser]vas13[/eluser]
Hi to all,

I am a new user of PHP 5 & CI and I am trying to develop my web blog using the CI framework that I find really cool based on what I have seen so far.

Having a strong programming background mainly in C & C++ I face with a really big problem while developing my web blog.

The problem is how to write CSS code in order to define the appearance of my content (mostly articles will be published).

For example I want to develop a comment form. Doing it so using CI it's pretty easy the back end development (i.e to code the controller to implement a database query and so). On the other hand when it comes to define the CSS so that this form can be presented nicely from the browser It seems to me too hard to start writing CSS including every detail.

What do you do guys? you are accustomed to write CSSs or you just copy CSS files from others??
I am just curious cuz at least to me it's seems difficult and time-consuming to write CSS files from scratch.

of course in big companies there are 2 distinct roles Web designer and Web developer but in case you are just only one what can you do? any tools out there for writing CSS easier ??? I use Netbeans for whatever code I am writing till now.

Any comment from experienced members and not only will be valuable to me.

Thanks in advance

[eluser]eoinmcg[/eluser]
css is really not difficult to get to grips with.

i suggest you take a look at some free templates out there, find one you like and base your blog on that. that way, you can see how it was put together and start making changes / learning how it works.

[eluser]vas13[/eluser]
Thanks for your reply

what you proposed to me it's what I am currently doing. I have a specific blog taking from someone else out there and I am trying to study it to change it a little and so on.

But it seems it needs time to get the hang of CSSs . Although, there is no other way as I see, you definetely need to understand what's going on with CSS, otherwise you can't have anything presentable on the web.

[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
If you want to truly understand CSS you need to learn about the box model. Here are some links to get you on your way:
http://kilianvalkhof.com/2008/css-xhtml/...ng-part-1/
http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/default.asp
http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/htm...sitioning/

If you understand the box model, you need to learn about the cascading properties of CSS:
http://monc.se/kitchen/38/cascading-orde...nce-in-css

After that you will find out that all you have learnt is mute when dealing with IE and you will start to hate it. Luckily you can have some fixes that make your life easier:
http://www.noupe.com/css/using-css-to-fi...fixes.html

Enjoy the ride!

[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
And ofcourse reading a book about the subject wont go to waste. Heres one that I can recommend:
http://www.cssmastery.com/

It's very extensive and covers everything from box-model to advanced css3 features plus more with nice examples and pictures.

[eluser]vas13[/eluser]
Thanks to all for your helpful and valiable responses.

I would like also to make a comment on another issue relating to the Web programming and design. CI as a framework is really cool. I would like to be written though in PHP 5 in order to integrade the most new OOP characteristic of PHP. Anyways this needs time.

Having read just a bit about Joomla, I would like to give me your opinion about all those CMS systems (written in PHP in our case here)

As for the design, does they help you at all? There are ready templates that you can install but the knowledge for CSS is necessary cuz you need to adapt them to your needs. So at least to me CMSs don't need to help a lot

As for the back programming, There are modules and add ons you can install and this makes it easy to install good components on you site w/o a lot of effort, but if you need to build something by yourself you need to write code as you do with CI.

What's your experience between a CMS like Joomla and a php framework like CI. what the pros and cons.

Thanks again for your responses

[eluser]n0xie[/eluser]
[quote author="vas13" date="1287115514"] I would like to be written though in PHP 5 in order to integrade the most new OOP characteristic of PHP.[/quote]
CI is written for PHP4 and PHP5. You can use all the functionality in PHP5 provided you have it installed.

[quote author="vas13" date="1287115514"]
Having read just a bit about Joomla, I would like to give me your opinion about all those CMS systems (written in PHP in our case here)[/quote]
In my opinion Joomla is horrible and should be avoided at all cost.

[quote author="vas13" date="1287115514"]
As for the design, does they help you at all?
[/quote]
No. In my opinion, webdesign is a different trade then webdeveloper/programmer.

[quote author="vas13" date="1287115514"]
What's your experience between a CMS like Joomla and a php framework like CI. what the pros and cons.
[/quote]
In my experience, most good CMS'es (which I can probably count on 1 hand, most CMS'es are definitely not good) make 80% of the work easy, 10% of the work hard and 10% of the work nearly impossible.

A framework like CI makes 80% of the work easy but tedious, 10% of the work hard, and the last 10% very hard, but doable.

There are few CMS'es out there which you can bend entirely to your will. Sure you can write your own 'modules' and 'plugins' and 'third-party' libraries, but generally speaking it takes about the same amount of time to write those, then to do build the entire site in CI. (provided you have some basic code on the shelf to take care of standard functionality)

As long as you want basic functionality, sure a standard CMS will be great. It's the exceptions that make people want to write their own code, and therefor switch to a framework.

If you want to try some good CMS'es I have a list here in no particular order:
Expression Engine
drupal
wordpress
pimcore
and last but not least
pyrocms which, like Expression Engine, is build on top of CodeIgniter

[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
Joomla.. Ew. Dont ever use that, ever. Its a resource hog, has so many security holes(usually third party modules) and needs to be updated very often. We have lots of Joomla customers(I work in hosting business) and usually not a month goes by when a customer asks for a backup of their site because their site was hacked. Joomla is kind of a curseword within hosting companies. I've had to do couple of modules to joomla also and I can surely say that it wasnt pleasant either..