posted on Tuesday, January 04, 2005 1:49 PM
by
Benjy
Rainbow and the mysterious Blue
My previous post sang the praises of DNN. Here's a bit of background.
I went back to DNN again because i nearly tore my hair out with Rainbow. I had built the site with the menu structures I wanted and decided to start working on the skin. So i copied an existing skin, renamed the folder and started working on the CSS. All I intended to do initially was change the banner color and the color scheme for the tab highlighting (active tabs, inactive tabs, hovering etc). But no matter what I did, the active tab name always remained blue which made it invisible when the background happened to be the same color. There was also no entry for the Blue color in the corresponding CSS class. I just couldnt find the blue setting anywhere. I dont know if there is some kind of inheritance in CSS and if this class had an unholy alliance with another class which caused it to be rendered in this color. But i looked for the hex representation in the code and couldnt find that either. A total mystery. And since Im not the patient sort, i just dropped it and turned back to DNN in desperation which, as I explained, has turned out to be a really cool app.
This reminds me of another time where I wanted to change the orange skin in Rainbow to something else and found the orange color hardcoded in the menu building module.
However I wont blame the Rainbow team . As one of the documents (in DNN) pointed out, skinning can be awfully hard especially in a generic portal software. All it takes is one module developer or skin developer to harcode color schemes or absolute positioning and everything gets screwed. In DNN they appear to have taken a different approach to skins which allows a complete separation of modules and presentation. Perhaps in the next version of Rainbow we will see something better.