About two weeks ago I was asked to dig into Deki Wiki so that I could help my customer build an intranet site from Deki Wiki.  There had been a lot of research done on what CMS/Wiki to use for this companies intranet site, and it finally came down to Deki Wiki. 

At first I was a little worried about Deki Wiki.  I hadn’t heard much on skinning the application.  I am a type of person who likes to skin CMS’s and hate to be boxed into a solution that I can’t make prettier.  After I got a chance to look around I was impressed with the way Deki Wiki was built.  It was created in a way that allows a lot of customization and skinning options.

After messing for a little while I found out that you can do all sorts of modification and it’s even pretty easy to create your own skin from scratch to include the markup and php code for the layout.  I decided however that for this intranet site that I would stick to just tweaking and changing a skin that comes with Deki Wiki.  I decided this for the simple fact that I wanted the site to be safe even through future Deki Wiki updates.  I figure it will be less work this way and less pain for the customer.

I ended up choosing the fiesta skin to play with, and I had a lot of fun changing things around.  There were a couple things that were frustrating through the process, but that could be because I started by changing the PRO skin instead of the wireframe.  Below are two screenshots of the skins I have done so far.  I plan on doing many more.

The next step will be trying to figure out a way to install or have multiple Deki Wiki sites on one server so I can display different skins rather than just the fiesta skins I create.

You can see these two skins and some skinning guides soon to come at deki.cornerpixel.net.

~MikePixel (Michael Silva)

I was working on some Deki Wiki Skins yesterday and came across the use of Variable in CSS.  I have been working with CSS for a while now and haven't used variables, and had never seen them before.  I feel pretty dumb for not knowing about that, but now I do, and I like them a bunch.

This is what I came across in Deki Wiki's CSS sheet.

.header .siteNav .userAuth a.userPage:hover {
    color: var(linkcolor_hover);
}

#siteNavTree a {
    color: var(sitenav_color);
}

There were some more, but that was just a couple.  Okay I Google' d CSS variables and I found a good article from the guys at disruptive-innovations.  Below is the meat of the article with a link to the full article below the information.

Using the value of a variable as the value or one of the values of a property in a CSS declaration should be achieved using the new functional notation var(). This function takes only one argument being the identifier being the name of the variable. The declaration becomes invalid if the variable does not exist.

Examples:

@variables
{ 
CorporateLogoBGColor: #fe8d12;
}

div.logoContainer
{ 
background-color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor);
}

More Examples:

@variables
{ 
myMargin1: 2em;
}
@variables print
{
myMargin1: 10px;
}

.data, div.entry
{ 
margin-left: 30px; 
margin-left: var(myMargin1);
}

In the example just above, the left margin of an element carrying the class 'data' will be 2em for instance for the 'screen' medium type, and 10px for the 'print' medium type in a user agent conformant to CSS Variables. A legacy non-conformant browser would apply a 30px left margin to such elements in all media types.

I highly recommend reading the full article.  It is very good.

~MikePixel (Michael Silva)

Way back months ago when I finished CornerPixel's website, my wife told me that it wasn't very pretty.  I told her that I didn't care about pretty and I just wanted it functional and clean.  (markup and CSS especially)

She didn't really like that answer, so I am thinking about refreshing the site and having a couple links (buttons) at the top of the page for people to click to change the sites appearance. 

I think this will accomplish two things. 

1. It will be an exercise in CSS and web standards because I won't be changing any markup, just CSS. 
2. It will make my wife happy.  Well okay a little happier.  It probably won't make her as happy as changing the site entirely, but it's better than nothing right?

The only problem I have with this is that when the user clicks over to the blog, the style will change right back to the old style.  That might look more unprofessional than if I just keep it all the same. 

Oh well, stick around and maybe in a couple months I will have my first button up for the users to push.

~Michael

Okay as you know, the site is called CornerPixel because I want it to eventually be known as a place for web professionals to come and use resources which are grounded in good standard practices.  Well evidently you won't come to this site for spelling help.  The site has been up for at least 4 months and a friend of mine just pointed out that I had misspelled CornerPixel in the banner. 

"WOW, how did I miss that?" I thought.  It was right at the top of my page.  Oh well, it is fixed now, but I did do a quick print screen so that I could post it here.

There you have it.  We are officially not the CornerPixel of Spelling.  I might even have to make it a point to misspell words in the future just to remind you all of that.

~Michael