template editing

[gouletjo]

Hi Folks

I really need your help! I would like to customize my detail page and I don't know where to start. What kind of information should I need to customize my template CSS, javascript, etc. What kind of books whould i read ? Thanks for your help

thanks for your help
Jonathan

[Balok]

Well, this is a rather complex question, but I'll take a swing at a simple answer.

The CSS used by templates is essentially the same CSS you'd find in use anywhere, with pretty much one exception: you can provide values from the Declarations section. So any good book on CSS will help you here. I've found the O'Reilly books to be generally pretty well written, but on CSS I learned it from reading the specification at the W3C site. Orange employs an integrated version of Internet Explorer, a fairly recent version. I've found that most of what's described by the spec works. The spec is here: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/. If you already understand CSS, then a pocket Reference like the O'Reilly version ought to be sufficient.

Unless you want to do some odd things, you probably don't need to learn Javascript right from the get go. You don't NEED it to make a template, it's just helpful for additional customization. I do recommend O'Reilly's Javascript Definitive Guide by Flanagan (get the most recent edition, which I believe is the Fifth Edition).

There's a thread elsewhere that shows how to download my Green template. It contains some javascript you can use as examples of what can be done. There's also some in the default templates that come with Orange.

The other thing you'll need to learn is the "object model" for accessing the internal data from Orange. Unfortunately, there's no good reference for that. The Template Editor that comes with Orange has a right margin box that contains a list of the available objects, but there's little information about what they do.

My best recommendation here is to do what I did: make a copy of the default template, and then try various things to see how they work. Be sure to use a copy while you're learning, to prevent ruining your only good template in case you make a mistake and forget what you did. Without a copy you'd have to reinstall, which isn't hard, but making the copy made me more... adventurous.

Past that, there are a few folks here who have written templates and may be able to answer general questions, include Orange creator Andrei who posts here from time to time.

[gouletjo]

thank you Balok!! I really appreciate it