Screencast: “Extra External CSS / Convert To StyleSheet”
Runtime: 14 min, 38 seconds
Are you tired of having to use the Extended button in your CSS palette to compensate for what’s not available in Freeway’s CSS drop-down options? Are you wanting to add your own styles without having to spend time inputting each item and would simply prefer to copy and paste it from an external CSS editor instead? In this screen-cast I cover how to use the External StyleSheet / Convert to StyleSheet action and how you can achieve professional looking CSS with it.
Besides running through it’s more basic features, I run you through the setup and how to attach the actions to your pages, how to apply existing styles, and wrapping up with how to copy and paste styles from an external editor (this screen-cast uses CSSEdit from http://www.macrabbit.com.)
On 10 Jan 2009, 7:30 am, Dan J wrote:
Are you tired of having to use the Extended button in your CSS palette to compensate for what’s not available in Freeway’s CSS drop-down options?
Yes! and thanks Dan for a great screencast, very useful, maybe V.6 of Freeway might have it built in ?
The external stylesheets cannot be manipulated by Actions. But the
internal ones can. If you apply the ESS Use External Stylesheets
Action to the page, and then check the Remove page styles checkbox,
you will have a clean slate, nothing there.
If you wanted to delete just those two and leave others in place, that
would be more difficult but it could be done, I suppose. The Action
can’t do it at the moment.
Walter
On Jan 12, 2009, at 5:45 AM, maccie wrote:
I’m wondering if there is a way to delete the body and html styles
from a generated stylesheet, so it is completely blank?
thank you for your comments. What I am trying to do is to create a stylesheet inside freeway for use within the webyep tinymce editor. I need a blank css file where I can paste only the styles the client can/may use within the rich text editor. There is no need to link to this stylesheet, as it is only for use in the rte (a link to this css file is inserted in the webyep element). I would like to be able to create styles within the freeway styles dialog, publish and then copy/paste the needed styles to the blank css file (I don’t need the html, body, img, f-lp, … styles). What I do now is: create a css file outside freeway, paste in the needed styles from the css file created by freeway, upload it in the css folder. Only thing I would wish for, is to be able to delete the html and body styles that are in the css file created with te ess action.
Well, this isn’t a complete solution, but you could define your own
body and html styles to override the ones Freeway adds. The styles
will be at the same level of importance, so if you have:
html { min-height: 100% } //generated by Freeway
and you type in the Extra Styles dialog:
html { min-height: auto }
the second definition would override Freeway’s, and would prevail in
any calculation of layout. (This is a very weak example, to be sure,
but do you see where I’m going with this?)
Walter
On Jan 12, 2009, at 11:11 AM, maccie wrote:
Only thing I would wish for, is to be able to delete the html and
body styles that are in the css file created with te ess action.
Actually there is a way to modify the action to produce no Freeway added styles much like Maccie was looking for. I’m not sure that’s what Walter wants to hear, but I modified it to attach a blank stylesheet so I could write my own.
Ha. I wrote it because I wasn’t happy with the way Freeway was working
at the time (no external stylesheets of any kind, really hard to work
with server-side includes, etc.) so if you can improve on my many-year-
old version, more power to you! Share the results, if you want to be
added to the ActionsForge project so you can upload your version, just
say the word!
It’s action 1.1. I wasn’t sure how to make my own action “block” since it’s a customized version of an already working action. Perhaps Walter can solve my situation or even recommend if it’s necessary to do so.
You could simply create a new Action, add it to this project, and name
it differently (this is known in the open-source world as “forking”,
and it’s a sign of respect, since you’re saying “this idea is worth
copying and extending”. Since you’ve been added to the ESS project as
an author, you can add Actions to the project (I think, haven’t been
through the model code in a while, let me know if it works!). Remember
to go through the action code and substitute your new name wherever it
appears – otherwise Freeway will make hissing noises and say that
there are two actions with the same name…
Walter
On Jan 13, 2009, at 3:27 AM, Dan J wrote:
Perhaps Walter can solve my situation or even recommend if it’s
necessary to do so.
I apologize if this is a wrong thread. My question is if I have old website created on Dreamweaver or other software. How can I import it in order to start working and upgrading it with Freeway 5 pro?
Thanks,
Vlad
Hi everyone I know this is an old thread resurrected but since this thread was restarted I thought I better just mention that there is an alternative action suite that I created a few months back which does a similar job except it works in a slightly different way.
The action is two part: a bespoke Script Maker and an action Script Linker that links this new document and writes the correct path to the newly created ccs file, regardless if you change the positions of both documents. (for example if you decide to place the new css file within the css folder).
The other difference is that the document creator is not restricted to creating just CSS file it can be used to create xml, javascript, css, morecss, php, html … etc etc files… in fact I have managed to copy the whole source code from one of apples own web page a paste it straight into the doc creator, and it worked perfectly. (although if you wanted to change anything within that bespoke html page you would need to know how to edit it by hand within the action palette)
The other difference is that the file created is clean so there are no original freeway created items in it. This can be very important say for php files.
Thanks for your ‘bump’ to this thread. If one is abroad for a while, one misses sometimes important info. Now I am at least aware of this briliant script-action-set. I’ll certainly dive into it. And let’s hope it’s all build into FW6…
