[Forum] Style Variable Editor is Horrible!

[hex1848]

Am I the only one that’s a little frustrated with the new style editor? The old way of editing the styles was pretty intuitive. The new way requires you to hunt through dozens of variables with little to no documentation. This is a very poor implementation.

I get around CSS pretty well, I know how to look at the source of an HTML document, look for a style and find it in a css file or style editor. I want to do something simple: Add a little padding to my site logo. I look at the source, the class I want is: logo-image. Why isn't there some sort of corresponding "Style Variable" for this logo-image? Heck, searching for logo in the Style Variable Editor comes up blank.

I figured out how to change the logo itself using the “titleimage” Style Variable (why it’s not called logoimage, like the css class is beyond me – so much for consistency). But there doesn’t seem to be any other properties that go along with this.

This is going to be a looooong day of porting my styles over... Thanks VB!

[Dody]

Don has posted a documentation guide for the stylevar:StyleVar Visual Dictionary for Forum, Blog, and CMS (PDF Documents)

[ChopSuey]

Hehe, vB 4 a "new" product!

[vivamexico55]

Am I the only one that’s a little frustrated with the new style editor? The old way of editing the styles was pretty intuitive. The new way requires you to hunt through dozens of variables with little to no documentation. This is a very poor implementation.

I get around CSS pretty well, I know how to look at the source of an HTML document, look for a style and find it in a css file or style editor. I want to do something simple: Add a little padding to my site logo. I look at the source, the class I want is: logo-image. Why isn't there some sort of corresponding "Style Variable" for this logo-image? Heck, searching for logo in the Style Variable Editor comes up blank.

I figured out how to change the logo itself using the “titleimage” Style Variable (why it’s not called logoimage, like the css class is beyond me – so much for consistency). But there doesn’t seem to be any other properties that go along with this.

This is going to be a looooong day of porting my styles over... Thanks VB!

Check the stylevar dictionary, that's the best way to get used to the new editor. In my opinion it is going to be better in the long term, I think all the stylevars give you a lot of control.

I also remember I chanegd my logo, but the name of the stylevar (I forget which one it is) doesn't have "logo" on it... It comes in the visual dictionary tho, it's essential.

[hex1848]

Thanks for the link, I did find the style guide, now at least I have 27 pages of pdf to look through to find out what a variable means, so much for the "help icon".

I ended up adding a style="padding:5px;" to the image link in the header template.

On a side note: why are all the style variables encrypted/hashed/whatever in the template.xml files?? If the editor isn't admittedly up to par, then at least let us edit things in the XML by hand!

I guess my biggest issue with this is that if you are going to completely change the way you style a product and bait people into pre paying for an upgrade, you better provide an upgrade wizard that will at least covert your color scheme over to the new method.

[Dody]

The way I do is:
1. I find the css class using firebug
2. I search for the css class and find the variables inside it.

[nforums]

It's missing a lot of classes from it though and some are still hardcoded into .css files.

[hex1848]

The way I do is:
1. I find the css class using firebug
2. I search for the css class and find the variables inside it.

ahhh.. so the css is now scattered around as templates.. thats a little helpful.

[vivamexico55]

Yeah, I don't think it's all finalized yet, it's probably going to be tweaked a bit still.

[mykes]

On a side note: why are all the style variables encrypted/hashed/whatever in the template.xml files?? If the editor isn't admittedly up to par, then at least let us edit things in the XML by hand!

This is a really good question.

I have 100+ styles to convert from vb3 to vb4 that involve different headers and a number of different style variables per. It would sure be nice to create one style and then edit the XML 100 times with a powerful programmer's editor than to have to fill out 800 forms.

[Nestor]

I agree. The stylevar system is stupid. If you're going to have that then make a GUI to simplify the process otherwise just give me a plain old CSS sheet to edit and a template to move things around.

[vlastanovak]

Like dody said, if you use firebug to work out the class name and then search for it, it's not as hard as it first seems.

That said, it's still frustrating as hell when you first start styling and I fail to understand why it was changed from the old method. I'd still much prefer to edit a simple stylesheet.

[Nestor]

One other thing that comes to mind, how many queries have to be perfomed to fill out the values of the various style sheets with the values in the stylevars? As oppsed to just delivering a straight out style sheet via html with no database queries involved. This is one feature that should be seriously reconsidered.

[Pelacat]

Cant agree more with him. Its a waste of time, im not really impressed with the new stuff that makes even more painful for developers.

Right now im just editing the css templates, the only way i'd get things faster using firebug.

[thedudleys]

im looking over the stylevar stuff and its really confusing compared to 3.8 where its simple and clean along with 1 simple css for the whole site, but now you got like 100 css' to edit plus the templates which seem to be more encoded rather than simple.