- Index and Notes on the chapter

Index

Notes on the guide:

1. This guide is specially thought for beginners or non coders to give theme the possibility to have their own site look: but also experienced coders and designers could take some practic notices on how AutoTheme works and to integrate their experience to produce more complex themes...

2. This guide wants only to be a starting point, an exercise on how to build simple templates.

3. This guide builds themes that are not W3C compatible, XHTML compatible, Accessibility compliant, but uses traditional HTML coding. Our staff coders and designers are working for this compliance... so, be tuned on http://www.maxdev.com for further developments.

4. Normally the design concept for CMS architecture is inspired from web static design method:
   
   - Paper sketch design => using Photoshop =>
   - Dreamweaver => create content =>
   - Generate html pages => convert to Autotheme
   Designers and coders work usually together in team to build professional sites: this guide won't follow this professional method, but will only give basic instructions and simplify as much as possible the use of AutoTheme: the purpose is to allow everybody, designer or not, coder or not, to have their self made and customized theme working on the site. So many statements made in this guide are only for educational use limited to the purposes of this tutorial.
   
   Used tools:

• MDPro: For the purpose of this guide you need a local machine with MDPro version 1.02 or later installed and running. This means also that you need to have Apache, PHP and MySQL running on this machine :-) .  Let's assume, you point to this URL on the local machine: http://127.0.0.1/mdpro to open your local test site.

• Web editor: I used Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 as web editor, but Window's Block Notes or other web editors, like OpenOffice.org HTML editor (used to write this guide) or Netscape, makes it also.

• A browser: I'm using IE 5.50, but it's better to have different browser to test the theme on the most used one, as Netscape, Mozilla.

• A graphic tool: I use The Gimp, open source software, to create and edit images and banners: it's professional and it allows you to do all the things commercial products do...But Fireworks or PhotoShop or others makes it also.

• a. The theme engine: AutoTheme
• b. Theme objects
• c. The new Theme directory
• d. The different Theme Templates you need
• e. Creating the Main Theme Template: theme.html
• f. The Three Column structure:
• g. AT commands
• h. Applying AT commands to theme.html template
• i. Left and right blocks template
• l. CSS styles
• m. Including other AT commands
• n. Creating and including customized area blocks
  • - Step 1: Create General Area block templates:
  • - Step 2: Inserting area blocks into theme.html
  • - Step 3: Creating 3 new blocks in the Admin Pannel
  • - Step 4: Customizing area block templates