Blue Strip Reloaded...

[Sketchy]

I thought about making a template from scratch, then I wondered what the heck it would be. One day, I was searching Zen Carts over the net to get some ideas... I found sooo many with a legendary template called Blue Strip. Of course, it was for older versions. I figured I would blend it in to Zen Cart 1.3x. Well, I had some headaches along the way. Firstly, I wasn't about to make a mess with the revamping, like having tons of needless override stuff. I wanted to stay away from tables, so I did it all by trial and error. One thing was that the shopping cart sidebox would have inner doubled borders, thanks to Kurio... that was solved with his modded shopping cart file that is included in this package. Secondly, the search box heading was pulling off the sidebox boxtop image. So, I experimented and found the problem... In the stylesheet, for LABEL, I changed the line-height to 1em and it solved the problem. The prototype template was NOT identical, I customized it as lightweight as I could and it has the typical shoddy font in the sideboxes due to the boxtop images having horizontal lines. Note: This template design does NOT allow the top/header EZ pages to be used, it was needed to bypass in order to make the copyright area borderless. If you have those switched on, turn them off for the header. The template also looks better with the Categories-Tabs Menu: OFF. I also made a break-through in rendering problems with Firefox, the fix is included in the stylesheet.

Known issues, minor horizontal scroll in 800x600... I forgot to fix it.

[Sketchy]

Uggghhh... What a dummy.

I apologize Kuroi, I spelled your user name wrongly here and in my text files for the template.

--> me <--you

[kuroi]

Forgiven. People post regularly asking for this template, so if you've submitted it as an add-on (I can't see it in the downloads area at the moment) you're going to be rather popular.

[kuroi]

Sketchy's new retro template is now available in the download section and can be viewed in action here. Nice work, Sketchy.

[Sketchy]

Thanks Kuroi!

As you can tell, using Firefox, the template has fixed dimensions and relies on the recommended settings to counterbalance between Firefox and Explorer.

I almost scrapped the idea when I realized the effect of the horizontal lined boxtop images had on the heading text, but I saw a crazy amount of stores using the original Blue Strip and I had to keep going with the project.

Each template I do, helps me to understand issues with cross browser compliancy and I get closer to finding better fixes... it frustrating, but it's also a interesting learning curve.

`The provided screenshot was taken with FF.

[Sketchy]

Just to be positive, I just tested this template with v1.3.5 and all is well. Since I made this one using the default overrides, there are no known issues with Firefox or MSIE6 / 7... like the problem or similar to what the Candied templates had before recent revisions.

Although, I overlooked a whitespace issue under the logo wrapper. It's an easy and quite common fix, so all you have to do is go into the default template folder and copy the tpl_header.php from the 'common' folder. Go into the Blue Strip template folder and paste the copy into the 'common' folder there. You only have to apply a tiny hack.

Find in the tpl_header.php;

<?php } // no HEADER_SALES_TEXT or SHOW_BANNERS_GROUP_SET2 ?>
</div>
<br class="clearBoth" />
<!--eof-branding display-->

Only delete the line in red.

I tested the fix with the three browsers stated prior and it works.

[mrbert]

Hi Sketchy,

Thanks for the conversion of the bluestrip template.

I adopted is for te shop of a friend of mine that I had to upgrade due to moving to another server. from version 1.27 to 1.37
it can be seen on
http://www.luxim.nl/

I see som strange behavior that I never saw with the old verion.
The lright boxes look a little funny.


The left box goes to centre now and then after clicking sub categories. Maybee due to a little slow server on this side :S

It looks like the containers are resizing is that correct?
Or is this some other phenomena

BTW i tested under FFox and explorer and bote look a bit different.

I sure like to use CSS myself for sizing and positionning but I rather had the old template system that was much less browser dependent to my exprience.

Bert

[JLA]

Hey, thanks for the template.

Took awhile but we finally got it to work with our site like the old bluestrip on 1.2.25

Linda and I are stumped on this issue though. Perhaps you can help

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57551

Thanks

[JLA]

Well, looks like JETTRUE found the answer

.hiddenField {
display:none;
}

This is missing from the BLUESTRIP CSS file

Thanks JETTRUE

[Ajeh]

Ain't the designer type grand? Thanks!