First steps to modify Bulletproof?

[Rookie-Doo]

Hi,

is there a "how to" for dummys to modify the bulletproof-template? Want to learn how to create my own template.

thx&greetz
rkd

[Don Chambers]

You might find useful information at: http://s9y-bulletproof.com/

But perhaps we can get you off to an initial start... what do you want to do differently than what you already see in one of BP's colorsets?

[Rookie-Doo]

what do you want to do differently than what you already see in one of BP's colorsets?

A friend of mine created a layout for me. I want to use it for my personal theme:

--> http://www.beautiful-baud.net/images/mi ... yprev2.jpg

Is this possible?

[Don Chambers]

Probably - but doing so will require some pretty significant skills. I'm not sure you need to use bulletproof to accomplish your objective though... bulletproof's greatest capability is to quickly provide a number of different layouts and other options. Since you already have a design concept, many of bulletproof's options become meaningless.

On several occasions, I have taken a page, such as you have shown, and first sliced it into containers that can be populated with content from Serendipity, such as a main content pane on the left, and a sidebar area on the right.

Another consideration will be if you are going to carefully control the content so that no page will ever be larger than you have shown, or if the graphic designer needs to design the layout in a way that allows a portion of it to be repeated vertically so that it works regardless of page height.

[Rookie-Doo]

I wanted to use bulletproof cause it is allowed to customize it. Don't want any problems with copyrights.

Which template should I use as "template"? I need an "engine" that allows me to create several categories at the top (maybe with sub-categories again).

thx alot for your quick helps!
rkd

[Don Chambers]

I didn't say you "couldn't" use bulletproof... you certainly can. It was designed to be a framework from which to build other templates. No copyright issues. My point was that bulletproof may be overkill for what you want to accomplish.

It looks to me like your designer may have created the screenshot using something like photoshop. My suggestion is that you have your designer also use photoshop (or similar) to create actual containers for content, slice the image, and generate the html & css for it too work as a regular html document. Once you have that, you can proceed with converting it to an s9y template.

[judebert]

The default template is distributed under the MIT license. You can use it as a base with no problem. In fact, you can only modify the files you need; anything not in your template directory will be automatically pulled from the templates/default/ directory.

You can copy the pieces of Bulletproof that you want for your own template, too. As Don mentioned, Bulletproof is a highly configurable theme; it allows complete transformations from simple selections in the configuration screen. This makes its template files quite complicated, with a lot of {if} statements.

If you know your template is never going to use that kind of configurability, you can remove big chunks of the templates (everything between the {if} you're not going to use and its {endif}).

That can get complicated, which is why Don was saying it would need "significant skills". Instead, just copy the files you need to modify from the default template to your own directory, and paste the bits of Bulletproof you need into them.

On the other hand, you can also make your own colorset for Bulletproof. If all you need to do is change the colors and images, and maybe hide a few things, you can do it all in CSS. That's what I did for my website; the colorset won't work well with some of the Bulletproof options (like moving the tab bar above the banner), but as long as you don't choose those options, it works great.