LDN - Luminis Developer Network

Can't make it to summit this year, so you all will have to fill us in on anything new. Last summit it sounded like Luminis 4 was going xhtml / css based, but when I went in the nested-tables file, and uncovered the sad truth, rather than brave through reworking their "new" skins (which are utterly useless) I decided to fall back on just keeping my mods in the nested tables file, which adds resources (CSS, JS, etc...) outside of the luminis patch folders.

Since they hadn't decided to go xhtml / css and let use do the customizations in css, I decided to take a stab at it. I'd heard a couple of brave souls mention that they'd made their nested tables css based layouts. So I figured, why don't we just start a project to agree on a standard nested tables file that is xhtml / css based, and show "them" how it should be done. Sure some people would need different resources added to the head, etc... but I figure we could break it down into enough smaller sized templates that we could still use the "customization layer" method and only have to override a template or two. Additionally we could also add our own parameters to kind of flick things on by overriding a parameter (parameters override in the customization layer as well). Then when we go to patch we just have a list of our standardized nested-tables files for the common patch releases, and not have to worry about checking changes you just download the latest version, so we don't all have to duplicate that effort, which was admittedly usually minor, but with this last round of changes I got fed up, and figured it was time to try to do something about it. At the very least we could show them how we can no longer accept table layouts and cumbersome skins that don't give us anything. That and I'm pretty sure everything in their skins could be done much more simply with CSS.

Features of my first stab:

• Uses image replacement techniques so our logos are headings with links, and our image buttons are normal li links.
• Managed to make it identical to our old layout.
• Got rid of the skin bologna
• Image roll overs are handled with only css shifting a background image that contains both states (no more JS preloading from the early 90s).
• Produces output that looks like it's from this century?

I haven't had the time to truly make this institution agnostic, but it could definitely be done. Kind of just trying to drum up some interest before I put any more effort into it. I also haven't ventured into the icon customization, so that would likely need to be addressed, I just hardcode ours, and don't use any role based ones (why the heck did they change that???).

Attached, screenshots of our portal with and without CSS. Also our nested tables customization layer (to test just rename theirs to nested-tables-orig.xsl and upload this one beside) and main css file (rename to .css).

If you're interested, we should start some kind of thread here (maybe there's a better way for collaboration) for changes and figure some way to post them.

Jon did you ever get around to setting up a SVN Repo?