Okay, I've got all of the CSS visual editor issues cleared up. I've also made a way to make subdomains here at digitalmediatree (rather than gevenvawebsites.com). This is one of my long range plans for the software - that I can put the ability to make sites behind any domain. So my clients will be end users who want their own sites, but hopefully also people like me that also have clients who want to build their own sites.

Anyway, the point here is that you can make a something.digitalmediatree.com site right now to check out what I am doing. Use this link:

http://genevawebsites.com/createsite/?dmt=true

This should create the site and land you on yoursite.digitalmediatree.com/geneva-first-run/ where you will be asked to make a username and password, and optionally leave an email address if you want to be able to recover your password. Once you pick a username and password you will be automatically logged in and taken to yoursite.digitalmediatree.com/help/ which has very brief overview of how to accomplish certain basic tasks.

To start the front page has been created, but there is nothing there. As with all geneva pages you can go to the front page and double click to get the edit palette. The front page has one container, called 'minimal main'. You can choose that from the edit palatte and click 'define container' since the container exists but the system needs to be told what kind of container you want. If you want to play around select 'textara' for 'container function:' and then give it any name right below where it says 'new name:'. Leave the rest of the options alone and click 'Save Changes'.

This will take you back to the front page. Double click anywhere again to get the edit palette, and now when you click on 'minimal main' it will say 'edit contents' instead of 'define container'. Click 'edit contents' to get to the usual posting box for entering text into your container. Enter some text and click 'Save'. You will be taken back to the front page where your text should be visible. Now dobule click to get the edit palette again, click on 'minimal main', and now you can start playing around with the visual CSS editor. The editor opens initially to 'typography', but you can use that pull down to access the other areas: margins, padding, border, and colors. Click 'Save' at the bottom of the palette to save your changes and return to the page.

The main new thing about the edit palette is now every CSS option has a checkbox next to it labeled 'inherit'. If 'inherit' is checked it means that the CSS style in question has no value, and thus "inherits" it's value from it's parent element. This is how CSS works, it "cascades" down in specificity (CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets.) This is all beyond the scope of this post, but you can think of the inherit checkbox as a switch to turn off that style (or maybe think of it as 'return to default'.) If you uncheck 'inherit' you will reveal the control for that style which will let you change it (font-size, color, etc...). If you ever want to remove something you've done, just set the control to 'inherit' and your changes will be removed.

Still too early to really do very much, but this much is definitely working and I'd love if anyone played around with it. As always let me know if you run into any trouble...


- jim 6-17-2013 8:37 pm




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