Well, I’ve done that before, but now I’m working with real ’frames’ that can be any size and only have about a 10px margin, which is fine with me.
Quite happy with the result, actually.
Real frames means for me that they consist of 9 pictures that make up the 4 borders, 4 corners and the content and will be stretched/repeated accordingly. That’s why my content stretches both vertically and horizontally without any issues. The menu and search have a dynamic height as well.
As a sidenote: Yes, I use mostly tables for this design. For the plain and simple reason that there’s nothing wrong with html-tables as such. Especially the frame-design gets MUCH more complicated and less browser-compatible with divs/spans.
Basic frame layout with a table:
[table][tr][td]tl[/td][td]t[/td][td]tr[/td][/tr][tr][td]l[/td][td]c(with all the content)[/td][td]r[/td][/tr][tr][td]bl[/td][td]b[/td][td]br[/td][/tr][/table]
To be honest, it’s just a really quick hack that shows me all the pages where people have commented/replied and I have not yet answered.
Simple, sweet and useful. ^_^
Another recent addition (less than half an hour ago) I’ve changed the site so that the background is fully transparent and I can use any color I desire.
Then i programmed a little snippet to generate a color in a gradient for me and use it as the body color. You can see this effect (it’s subtle, but there) every few minutes.
It’s actually continuous as soft as RGB allows, but it’s too subtle for the eye to see. But, over the course of an hour or two, the changes should be noticable.
ps. The graident color logic took the most time. Integrating it into my theme was a breeze, as is everything with MODx
That is a very nice gradient, very subtle.
Not sure I understood the process? You have a snippet that generates the gradient as an image file? Does it do it for every page render so that every page could have its own color?
Well, I could make every page have it’s own color. And it’s not a graiden,t just a CSS BG color with a PNG on top of it.
What I have is a snippet that generated that background-color.
The only input is 4 colors, and PHP calculates the fades between them so you won’t see any difference in a short time.
I still need to make the whole thing a lot more flexible, so it would take an array of colors as input and make a dynamic gradient out of it.
Also, I calculate the ’percentage’ of the day to use for the gradient. Using the simple formula: percentage = (hour + minute/60) / 24
This returns 25% for 6am, 50% for noon, etc.
And that’s the place in the gradient I use for the ’current’ background.
MODX Staff