This site is built using a LOT of magic. Every page is different for
everyone who visits it, and all the navigation, pages, links, etc. are
built on the fly by the server.
On that server, there is a MySQL database containing separate tables
for the forums, threads (discussion topics), messages, and people.
(There are additional tables that manage the complex inter-
relationships between messages and who has read them, too.) When you
visit a “page” (air-quotes, because there are no pages in this entire
site, only templates and data to fill them) you are setting in motion
a complex application that reads the URL, decides what you want, asks
the database for the latest content that matches your request, and
populates a set of templates with that content. There’s an entire
other layer of the application that decides whether you are allowed to
see that content in the first place, and doesn’t even show you a link
to it if you aren’t, and shows you an error if you try anyway.
If you’re not trying to do the same trick (scrape a mailing list and
turn it into a Web site), then you can probably get started with
something simpler, like WebYep or sNews, both of which have been
written up heavily in this and other Freeway mailing lists.
If you wanted to build one of these things from scratch, you would
need a lot of programming experience, and this might be a step too far
for a first lesson in server-side application development.
If you want to mimic the layout of the page, that’s incredibly easy in
Freeway 5 Pro:
- New document, XHTML Strict, 750px wide.
- Move to the master page, double-click on the page to access the
PageDiv, and select Insert / HTML Item from the main menu. With that
element selected, set its width to 100%, and give it a background
color (this forms your header bar).
- Double-click inside the header so you see a flashing text cursor,
and insert another HTML item in it. Give it a width of 750px and
margin of auto. This forms the centered header over your page.
- Double-click below the header so the flashing text cursor is
visible (barely) to the right of your header. Again, Insert / HTML
Item. Make its width 100% and give it a white background. This is the
middle stripe of the page.
- Double-click inside the middle stripe and insert another HTML item
inside the stripe (not outside it). Set its width to 750px, and its
margin to “auto”. This will form the centered content area for your
pages.
- Double-click below the middle stripe and add a line of text to form
your footer. Set it to align center, and you can use the Space Above
setting to give it some “air” above it.
- Give the page a background color using the Inspector. This will
form the stripe of color behind the footer, and give all pages shorter
than the browser window the look of a “shelf” of color at their bottom.
Now you can move to your regular pages, and update them with content.
You’ll need to build everything as an inline layout (which is the road
this outline takes you down). There are a lot of threads here about
that technique, and even some video demos.
Hope this helps,
Walter
On May 15, 2009, at 12:24 PM, Warner wrote:
I would like to model a site after the layout but also, to a certain
extent, the way it works. I would like to have a number of
categories similar to the ActionsDev, FreewayTalk categories on this
site that would lead to a list of topics which would, in turn, lead
to a discussion thread. If I could get that much going I might look
at mailing lists, etc. later.
Warner
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options
freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options