Luminis fluid width layout versus static width layout. Why, and what does your institution use?
I'm looking for information that supports some of the advantages or disadvantage with having a fluid vs a static layout for luminis. What is the normal practice, in regards to fixed/fluid width, for your institution? By default luminis provides a fluid layout that allow for the width of the portal and the channels to scaled. However, I've heard arguments that support having a fixed width will allow more control and confidence over the presentation layer and the user experience with the exception that width consideration over developing channels is a little more involved. In retrospect, having a fluid layout allows for a user and the portal to scale based on the users resolution setting.
Please let us know if you use fixed width and what value and reason or fluid width and what reason.
Thank you,
J. Anglero
Depends
We use both, kinda.
http://www.pcc.edu for instance, our public facing site, is designed as more of an advertisement and recruitment tool. It is focused on prospective students, and as such is treated as more of a presentation that has style and marketing attributes.
The layout is rigid in order to provide a consistent, visually appealing (we hope!) site that attracts users and gives them a good impression.
Our Luminis portal, on the other hand, is considered more of a functional tool. It is there to allow people to get things done. Bill Pay, registration, looking at the events for the day, etc...
Because of that, we allow most of it to be fluid. This helps cellphone/pda/netbook users, and is easier to manage given that the portal can be customized. Adding tabs, channel owners constantly updating things, etc... and a fluid layout is a better choice.
Since we also heavily skinned the portal, cutting out nearly every bit of table code we could find, a fluid layout was easier to implement than if we had not cut out all the hard coded "td width=blah" that are all throughout Luminis.
"skinning" Luminis
I'm very interested in your "heavily skinned" version of Luminis. We absolutely hate the table-based layouts in Luminis which make even the most minor visual/layout changes ridiculously difficult.
Would you be willing to explain your process or perhaps give me a list of the files you modified. Things seem to be spread out all over the place.
skinning
Our basic approach was to take the list of files below, and remove the majority of the table code and hard-coded styles. Once we had the site displaying as basically a totally unformatted list of content, we put divs around each section of content (icons, channels, etc..), gave them classes and/or id's, and then built a single controlling style sheet. There are several places where you need to update what style sheets are called, css.jsp, nested-tables.xsl, etc..
We also ended up building a small javascript library to handle some formatting issues that were somewhat difficult to manage using pure css. That will probably be dependent on what skill sets you have.
One of the trickier things was working with nested-tables.xsl. Since patches usually overwrite this file, we now have 2 of them. One that contains our modifications (nested-tables.xsl) and the original version, nested-tables-orig.xsl, which is called at the top of our custom one like so:
<xsl:import href="nested-tables-orig.xsl"/>
These are the files we've touched that are appearance related.
channel.xsl $CP_ROOT/custom/mypcc
custom.jsp $CP_ROOT/custom/mypcc
custom.css $CP_ROOT/custom/mypcc
customIcons.xsl $CP_ROOT/custom/mypcc
login.txt $CP_ROOT/webapps/luminis/site/
util.js $CP_ROOT/webapps/luminis/js/
nested-tables.xsl $CP_WEBINF/uPortal/org/jasig/portal/layout/tab-column/nested-tables/
login.jsp $CP_ROOT/webapps/luminis/jsp/portal/
footer.jsp $CP_ROOT/webapps/luminis/jsp/lib/
css.jsp $CP_ROOT/webapps/luminis/jsp/lib/
custom.xsl $CP_ROOT/custom/mypcc
nested-tables.xsl $CP_WEBINF/uPortal/org/jasig/portal/layout/tab-column/nested-tables/
schedule.jsp $CP_ROOT/webapps/luminis/jsp/services/
Deployment
deployskintemplate -t skinname -c (-c only if the first time)