I've taken a short break from PHP work to make some new templates for Tabulas... the new templates will all eventually be XHTML 1.0/CSS 1.0 standard compliant. Of course, the whole site will also aim to be a lot more accessible ...

Note that these are not complete templates... I'm just throwing them up for now so you can guys can take a look. They will all be most likely tweaked (with the exception of template 5) I will also be creating alternate stylesheets for each page so that users can select preset "color schemes."

Note that I haven't redesigned a single one of the existing templates. I think they will most likely be trashed (although I might adapt the two decent ones ... and "upgrade" them).

Check out the source codes on the files... all using nice valid semantic markup.

My favorite one (and the one that took the far longest) is template 5... note how the template reacts when you hover over the links ... the design is very minimalist but effective. I will most likely either use this one or template 2 as the "default" Tabulas template for users. The only thing that bothers me about template 5 is that I didn't use a list to create the top navigational links. After about an hour of trying to hack together a bunch of background-images and using weird borders, I gave up and just decided to use the current method.

Oh yeah, before you guys lambast me for my lack of design skills, Template 3 is going to be called "The 1996 Template." It's just a throwback template to the good ol' glory days when no one actually styled their websites. I got a good laugh when I made it ... and I'll probably use it on this site once I get the new templating system up. Roffles.

- Template 1
- Template 2
- Template 3
- Template 5

If you any of you webdesign dorks wants to help me test it out, if you can check against other browsers ... I only checked against IE in Windows (lazy me). Also let me know if you see any blatant flaws with the HTML/CSS...


One of the big things that will change besides being to actually select more than oen color scheme is that I'm thinking of tying entry styles to templates. I'm not entirely sold on this idea yet, so I'm likely to vacillate, but it seems to much easier if I just tie entry style to templates .. the stylistic consistency could be forced upon the users. It's also a lot easier when I create these templates, because I have more slack when creating CSS classes; I don't think the new templating system/styling system is going to be "plug-and-play" for different CSS files since I'm relying so heavily on CSS files for outputting.

Which means that stylistically, allowing different entry styles might no be smart.

But if I could manage to make the entry templates plug-and-play and account for all possible types within all the CSS files, that would be really l33t.

Ahhhh!