repatative question, no "true" answer yet.

[trish r]

I really want to change the look of my blog before I post it. I am admittedly lame when it comes to this sort of thing.
But I want to edit my template in Dreamweaver. I found this post: (http://forum.pixelpost.org/showthread.php?t=4773&highlight=dreamweaver)
But there wasn't a clear answer. I searched the forum (http://forum.pixelpost.org/forumdisplay.php?f=25) with all of the posts about xhtml & Css. But none of them understand lame newbies. All I found were links thick with what I see as chinese. I know just enough html to get me by. I built my site a couple of years ago with it. but I'm beginning to feel like I am in way over my head here.
Aside from sounding like a whiney brat, I guess I just need to know if I am going to be able to edit this template in Dreamweaver visually. Because if I can't, I need to find someone who I can pay to do it.
On that note....anyone willing to get paid? Just thought I would throw it out there.
Thanks for any help and reading my whiney lame newbie post.
~Trish

[austriaka]

You can edit the templates with a webeditor like Dreamweaver, but you run into a problem: Pixelpost uses special TAGs which are replaced by some data when working the php-files. Webeditors will replace those TAGs because they are not valid HTML tags and they don't know them.

To understand that, I have to explain how the pages in Pixelpost are built for viewing them in a browser: of course you have not a singe HTML page for each photo you want to show, but you have one script which is told what image to show (by showimage=123 in the URL).
Now PHP has a lot of work to find out the address of the image with the id 123, making the next and previous links for it, which thumbnails to show, which info and comments belong to this image and so on.
You will never see something of this work, because the result is a valid HTML page with the correct image information provided for the ID given in the address.

Yes, you can edit your files with dreamweaver until your layout is ready. Use one of your images for that (address, title, description...).
Then open the original image_template.html with a simple text editor!!! and look for the Pixelpost Tags (<THUMBNAILS> for example or <IMAGE_TITLE>). In your docs folder you find a list of all available Pixelpost Tags too.
Open your dreamweaver file with a text editor too and replace all "variable" parts of your template file by the Pixelpost tags.
For example in your Webeditor File you will find
<meta http-equiv="content-type" name="description" content="&lt;SITE_TITLE&gt;-PhotoBlog: &lt;IMAGE_TITLE&gt;, &lt;IMAGE_NOTES_CLEAN&gt;" />
Replace that with
<meta http-equiv="content-type" name="description" content="<SITE_TITLE>-PhotoBlog: <IMAGE_TITLE>, <IMAGE_NOTES_CLEAN>" />

You will find something like <a href="index.php?showimage=123">
<img src="images/nameofyourimage.jpg" alt="My Image Title" title="previous image: My previous image title" width="650" height="400" id="photo" />
</a>

replace that with
<a href="index.php?showimage=<SC_IMAGE_PREVIOUS_ID>&amp;category=<SC_CAT_ID>">
<img src="<IMAGE_PATH><IMAGE_NAME>" alt="<IMAGE_TITLE>" title="previous image: <SC_IMAGE_PREVIOUS_TITLE>" width="<IMAGE_WIDTH>" height="<IMAGE_HEIGHT>" id="photo" <ATTRIBUT_NAME> />
</a>

Not easy, but possible :-)
HTH
KArin

[trish r]

That is a huge help. I can't wait to sit down and try to knock it out. I appreciate you taking the time.
~Trish