How to make a Nuke Theme "Compliant"

Court Jester Joined: Sep 20, 2003 Posts: 106

Ive worked and worked and worked on the theme on my new site, to figure out how to make it 100% compliant. I changed all the random & that were stuck in URL's with & I fixed some useless tags hanging around, ive done everything i could so the main page (im not attempting the forum for a dreadfully long time, 400+ errors just makes me want to throw nuke away) 100% 4.01 HTML Transitional Compliant.

The last two things I must fix, somehow (no knowlege of a good way to use CSS, trust me I have tried) is to replaced the <TD BACKGROUND (theme to psycho) and also <Table BORDERCOLOR (odd that that isnt allowed)

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://mafiastation.com <-proof I worked for 3 days with no sleep

So the elimination of these two w3 evils would be nice. Yes I have many sites on thsi network and a few of them (dreadfully) have scrolling blocks. If that could be addressed it would also be a very good thing.

Edit: And yes Dreamweaver MX told me to use them. "BACKGROUND and BORDERCOLOR" They were options in the HTML tags. Blame them.

Sells PC To Pay For Divorce Joined: Posts: 5661

Well it can be a pain in the...
But i used wordpress a long time and found it a funny job getting it all validated .
I suggest you read closely what the errors say and they give you an idea whats wrong.
just edit directly onlune and make the changes..

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2005 8:30 am

Hi Anubis

Thanks for posting this publically as requested.

As promised, I will address your issues, but in kind of a round-about way.

Today, I am working on Part 1 of a series of articles meant to tackle compliance issues with PHP-Nuke. In that regard, as soon as I finish part 1, it will be posted at http://64bit.us and I will of course once again respond to this thread with the exact article link.

Regarding your specific problems, I thought I should mention that while the W3C is saying that you only have a couple errors, you in fact have 57 on your homepage.

Now I know what you are thinking... "WTF???" Well, the problem is because W3C is having some compliance validation issues right now with their free validator and I'm "assured" by W3C that they are working on addressing those issues. For a few days the CSS compliance validation functions were even off-line while they worked on the issues there as well.

Now... In reference to Dreamweaver itself. I've gotta start by saying that Dreamweaver is a heck of a lot closer to adhering to compliance standards than Adobe Photoshop. Adobe is just plain terrible at it, which is why there is no such thing as a compliant Nuke theme.

To make matters worse, PHP-Nuke itself is anything but compliant. PHP-Nuke 7.6 is probably the closest; however, PHP-Nuke 7.7 and PHP-Nuke 7.8 went in the opposite direction by actually removing compiance features (leave it to FB to make something worse).

I have addressed some of that in my article "Why You Should NOT Use PHP-Nuke 7.7 or 7.8" at http://64bit.us/article83.html

Now... onto the background images issue.

It's okay to have background colors and images; however, it's HOW you use the term itself. This goes to a root PHP-Nuke problem of commonly doing things like:

Code:

<td background=\"themes/YOUR_THEME/whatever.gif\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\">

This in fact is a non-compliant method (which I will discuss at length in my article). On top of being non-compliant, it actually slows down load time in some browsers because they have to "interpret" how to handle this.

The proper method is to define it as a "style", which in fact it is.

So, given that, a background image (in order to be Compliant to W3C Presentation standards) should be defined like this:

Code:

<td style=\"background-image: url(themes/YOUR_THEME/images/whatever.gif)\" width=\"100\" HEIGHT=\"100\">

Notice how the style is defined! That is very important and the reason why NOBODY (okay, except myself and ... now Raven Smile

) has a compliant theme!

You will have to check your theme.php, your header and footer files for all instances of how background images are put in, and use the format described above to make them all compliant.

That should get you started until I finish my article!

Enjoy!
Steph

registered · Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2005 9:56 am

I for one am looking forward to reading the article once you have finished. Trying to make Nuke WC3 complaint is a pain in the (well you know).

It makes me laugh everytime I see Nuke's complaint link and icon, what a lie that is.

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2005 12:35 pm

Well this is what phpnuke originaly says.....

PHP-Nuke is developed with a particular eye to the suggestions of the [http:/
/www.w3c.org] W3C, in its origin, the code is in fact W3C compliant and one
has validated both the code and the style sheets.
It is then up to the user
who intends to create a portal to adhere to these standards during the
modification of the graphics or the intrinsic characteristics of the system.

Site Admin/Owner Joined: Aug 27, 2002 Posts: 17088

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2005 1:01 pm

And thus the next Wastelands was born in my head.

Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2005 1:26 pm

creativity starts there...as they say..

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 3:06 pm

This promises to be an extremely intersting article, I am looking forward to submersing myself in it.

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 3:18 pm

lol..i almost forgot this topic...
but what ehh..is submersing?

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 5:35 pm

hitwalker wrote:

lol..i almost forgot this topic...
but what ehh..is submersing?

Submersing in this context means he is really gonna dig into it to absorb the knowledge that is shared.

I too look forward to this one as well.

Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2005 5:42 pm

oh like that....
Well thats not for me anymore.
It was a continues battle to keep everything valid when i was using wordpress as a blog.
But as soon as i added something to the site i had to dive in the code again.
So after a long time it takes the fun out of running a blog.
And if you have so much other things to do then you finaly give up...