Quote Originally Posted by martynbaker52 View Post
Hi all,
I've asked my freelancer (via UpWork) to update my site to 155a and to update my site to the "out of the box" responsive template. He advised there were "major issues". Is this correct or is he making this up?
Also does anyone want to share there zencart sites so that I can see what the live site looks like with the new template.
I've often said that a person can have a doctor's degree in keyboard and not know a thing about the mouse.
Your freelancer may know a lot about the keyboard (PHP) and just be able to wave the mouse (CSS) around a little.
Anne and Ray have done wonders for the Zen Cart community in the template area. Are there a few hiccups in the stylesheets? Yes, after all, pobody's nerfect
We are currently working on the stylesheets for 155a in an effort to make them easier for your freelancer (and anyone for that matter) to change colors. The reason for this is not that the stylesheets are wrong but that they are organized in a way that adds a degree of difficulty above and beyond the beginner/intermediate CSS knowledge.
There are minor mistakes like #mainWrapper and #contentMainWrapper both appearing twice in the call on line 18 of the stylesheet_colors.css but that shouldn't slow down an "expert." There are some colors defined that, just simply, don't show up in the cart. That really isn't a big deal. Neither is the fact that colors for the site are also defined in five other stylesheets. A qualified person could easily see them with the tools most of us use.
Your freelancer may be trying to steer you in a direction he or she is more familiar with and avoid having to learn something new or work out the kinks. We agree that changing a font color and having it change one link, another's hover, and another's heading font can be daunting. (see line 3 of stylesheets_colors.css) That's why we have been looking at changing the way folks can manage the colors.
As we see it, anyone with an intermediate knowledge of CSS should be able to get the job done with the existing stylesheets. Our goal in "rearranging" the stylesheets is to make it very simple for any store owner to manipulate the colors of their site. We did something similar for the classic template back in the stone age.
We visualize that there are basically nine colors involved in most sites. If we use one for warnings, hover/visited, form backgrounds, drop-down backgrounds we have used four colors. Add to that the use of white and black where needed for fonts and there are only three colors left.
As an example, we use three blues for one site. #6699CC (Blue Danube), #99CCFF (Anakiwa Blue), and #CAE5FF (Onahau) are really just baby blue, light blue and an even lighter blue. We use the medium as the main background, the darker for nav bars/headings, and the lighter in the presentation of products.
The result is that you can rapidly change colors with just a search and replace.
We're also adding rgba calls which allow the user to adjust the color's opacity in the stylesheet.
And, while we're at it, we're trying to fix any stray css errors and address the warnings.
Can be seen at aaawesometoyDOTcom/test_155a We will be using it with the #mainWrapper turned off.
haredoDOTcom is a working example of what we've done.