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HowTo : Create custom CSS Styles
For creating custom CSS Styles, you will be required to use a technique known as ZMI through-the-web customization.
Steps to create custom CSS Styles :
- First login with Site Administrator privileges
- Get to ZMI at http://yourcyninsite/manage
- Now find portal_skins and Click on it. You'll get a biggish page - you want to find ubify_custom_styles and click that.
- Here you will find all the CSS files that cynin uses. The file that you need to override is banners.css. Click it and go inside.
- It will open in read only mode. Click the customize button. It will ask you where you want to place it. Don't change anything, just submit. Your customized banners css will now open for editing, you can maintain this by yourself from that point on.
- Bookmark this URL from the breadcrumb, not the address bar, the page is usually in an iframe. You can use the bookmark to directly land inside edit any time you want.
Some tips/points:
- This customized file will be maintained even when we upgrade with newer versions of cynin.
- If you find yourself using the same style repeatedly, there *is* a way to directly add it to your kupu styles dropdown, it will be available to all content authors though.
- Editing what's already there in the file and adding new selectors,
classes is easy, but you should take care to *not* override any cynin
CSS that is not already present in bannners.css.dtml - this file is
loaded last and all overrides will work but cyn.in UI css is complex
and you may end up breaking the UI if you're not careful.
- Changes in this file will not appear immediately, when you try to use
it. Go to portal_css at /manage and turn on debug mode and hit
the save button at the bottom of the page. Remember to turn off debug
mode when you're done - it reduces perfomance a bit when debug is on.
- Do not override by clicking on customize on any other file - doing
that will block your upgrade path for future versions of cynin.
- You must already be using Firefox+Firebug, right? :)
The instructions are valid even for v3.0.5, as far as I can see. They are assuming that you are logged in with siteadmin and can access ZMI at /manage on your site. This should be true if you're using the Cyn.in ISO CD way.
If you did a buildout, and went in at the 8080 port then you would also know that you'd have to go one level deeper at /cynin.
So frankly I'm puzzled why this is not working for you. Could you explain in a bit more detail what's happening when you go to /manage? Or if you could dump a few screenshots in Sandbox Space and link them from here?
Do I have to explicitly create users with access to the ZMI?
p.s I used to be a huge Zope fan (almost 10 years ago http://www.theotherblog.com/search/zope/page/5/ ) it's nice to be back :-)
It's not completely clear when installing cyn.in when it asks for usernames and passwords, which will be used where... I can't say I spotted the admin/secret one...
It seems there are ...
1. The Cynin admin siteadmin/secret
2. The Zope admin admin/secret
3. The root for the box
4. A user for the box (not root... not sure why).
Is this right?
The root user's password *is* asked during the setup from the ISO CD.
You are asked for root password, and then what "normal" username you want on the linux box, and the password for that.
There are 2 users that Cyn.in creates for every out-of-box buildout, admin and siteadmin. Both have a default password of "secret" which you *should* change. Refer to this guide for how to change the admin user's password: http://www.cynapse.com/[…]/change-admin-password
http://mysite/cynin/portal_skins/custom/banners.css/manage_main
Hmm.... but you're probably right, that URL should probably be fixed.
#maintitle{
background:red;
font-size:100px;
}
...hoping that it might show up in the h1 used throughout the site, but it doesn't... the yamlbase.css seems to get loaded last and renamed by a caching thing along the way ... I added the CSS to that file and I still don't see any changes in my site.
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/93802/cynin_css.png
It's an intermediate bug (doesn't always happen) that is due to a combination of 2 different event handles (we want to catch focus on the comment textbox to clear the prompt text that we show ("Post a comment"), plus, we want to show the Cancel, Post buttons) and in only some browsers.
We'll re-work this soon.
Not saying it's not possible, but the approach *is* fraught with difficulty. As you no doubt experienced, Cyn.in commenting is designed to be high-throughput, and that it must remain, above all else.
I must admin though, a little bit of formatting *does* help with breaking up the monotony in a long comment. Some formatting with markdown syntax was actually possible at one point of time with commenting but this was replaced in lieu of auto-URL highlighting within comments (yes, it was unfortunately mutually exclusive at that point of time, and the markdown rendering itself was suboptimal). With some investigation this could perhaps be taken up. All this ultimately drills deep down into Plone's portal_transforms content transformation engine, internally.
Like for example if you were running v3.1 and had customized plone_custom.css, then you wouldn't get the lovely CSS shadows that we added in 3.1.1 in your installation, because your customized one would not have them.
Instead, you can take a selector from anywhere you want, and add it in and customize away in banners.css - this way you will *override* only any changes you make, while the new stuff we add can keep coming in.
So if you inadvertently modify these without knowing what you're doing, you could break the UI a lot more than what you would think is possible! :)