Thanks for the replies. I'll relate my experience on following up with each suggestion. Though my responses are critical, please don't take it to mean they are not good suggestions - I simply intend to relate why they are, or are not convenient for me.
First, I had hoped to avoid Xanthia or any other theme system. A simple
PHP file and a
CSS file suffices quite well, and is easier to manage for me when I am only working with one site and one theme. Even if I want to tweak the theme, it is easy enough to write div tags on the theme page, which can put anything anywhere. It doesn't take much
PHP skill to understand that any
HTML one wants on a page can be included between the single-quotes of a
PHP command that says: echo ' (
HTML here) ';
I've yet to fully understand the reason Xanthia's theme engine is incorporated in PostNuke -- not because I think it is useless, but because I have never found the uses. In earlier installations, I ran into problems related to operating Xanthia that dissabled the sites. Rather than attempting to debug a theme engine that served me no clear purpose, it was easier to use a simple "classic" theme that I could edit with basic
HTML and
PHP skills. With some add-ones, especially with early versions of Nate Welch's tabbed content blocks, classic themes were less buggy.
That doesn't mean I'm done with Xanthia. As it currently stands, I'll probably upload and tweak xExtralight to my specs so I can use Xanthia's short
URL schema.
AutoTheme [47] might be useful, but it's primary reason d etre seems to be allowing people with no
PHP skills to create themes. For my part, I don't know who would be creating multiple themes or
CMS-driven Web sites without trying to learn
PHP, but if the author can get $99.95 per license, there must be a market. For my purposes, the money would be better spent on three texts that would teach me
PHP, and if I were creating multiple sites with multiple themes, I would want to understand at least the fundamentals of the languages driving the sites I'm creating. But that's just me. I don't use Dreamweaver, either, and many Web designers with far more market for their skills than I have prefer to use editing engines than to understand the basics of the languages behind the products they sell. I don't understand complex
PHP architecture, or any hex language, so I'm not exactly articulate in all the language either.
dp-ShortUrls might be my preferred solution, but even after being pointed to a working download site, I still can't access it. First, I had to register to get the download. That's no big problem, and I did. But then I found the download was in a .RAR format. I searched for a software to read .RAR and found two so far. One was a payware, and I didn't feel inclined to pay for a software to open another software to learn if it would serve my purposes. That's just too much cost and speculation to investigate potential functionality that would remove a few letters from a
URL for a site that doesn't make me any money. My primary purpose in the site is mostly to collect resources I use at various remote locations, such as RSS news feeds, and secondarily, to remain familiar with Postnuke. The freeware I downloaded to read the RAR file -- WinAce -- just didn't operate when I tried to run it.
If dp-ShortUrls was packaged as a .zip or .tar file I would no doubt try it. For my purposes, though, whatever advantage .rar might offer (multimedia compression, repairs damaged archives?) it doesn't overcome the inconvenience of trying to find, or having to purchase, something that can read them.
At this point, it looks like I'll spend a couple hours or more switching over to Xanthia, morphing one of the themes to do what I need, and merging the style sheets I've built to suit the Xanthia theme.
Thanks to all for the input. I'll post back if I get a short
URL scheme working under any system. I'm sure if I put in the time, I'll get at least one schema working.
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[16] Posted: 25.08.2006, 06:56
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