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[shertmann Friend shertmannJoin date: September 2008Posts: 339Downloads:0Uploads:1 Thanks: 22 Thanked: 42 times in 26 posts]

#133851

Is very common when you start ussing aplications as joomla virtuemar oscommerce or any other opensource that you feel pretty lost to found where i has to look to edit or change or correct something.
you are not alone everybody in this or another forums have the same feeling, sometimes is a matter that there is not a full documentation for to develop or to tweek, but remember this are opensource aplications that people in the begining do for the joy of do or share a wonderfull tool for other, then you must find or wait that another dude have the same issue that you have but when the issue is hard to find how do you must act?

well there is no cooking recipe for all the issues but there are guidelines here some from my personal experience for helping to anyone that needs it

1.- when you are not a coder you can be absolutely lost so it is better not tweek the code unless you now what you are doing
2.-every change you made comment it in order that you know what to do and how you can undo that change
3.- try to do not touch any core file unless it is necesary
4.-try to have in mind what you want to achieve before you start.
5.-when editing an css tag and you don’t know where it is located use the firebug extension that tool helps you to easily find the right place and saves you hours or reading css style sheets or lines of code.
6.- once you know where the css tag is called search your source code with that name that will points you in the right way in most of the cases, if you use dreamweaver like almost the mayority of coder or designers do use the find and replace function for to found the right place
7.- if you must edit a css atribute you can comment it in order to change it absolutely, that is a very common practice of coders for first be sure that the change do what you want to do, the way to comment and css atribut is as follows

lets see and example:

suppose this tag in css in the red.css of the jamesolite template

div.moduletable h3,
div.moduletable_menu h3,
div.moduletable_text h3,
div.moduletable_hilite h3,
div.moduletable_menuhilite h3 {
background: url(../../images/red/dot-hilite.gif) repeat-y left #F7F7F7;
color: #Ffffff;
}

you found the font color in a hexadecimal format and it means FFFFFF=white
so supose that you want to change to red then we comment that line for future reasons or just because we want to be sure that the change is right in that place

div.moduletable h3,
div.moduletable_menu h3,
div.moduletable_text h3,
div.moduletable_hilite h3,
div.moduletable_menuhilite h3 {
background: url(../../images/red/dot-hilite.gif) repeat-y left #F7F7F7;
//color: #Ffffff;
}

if you see this code you see that before the color tag we set and “//” this is used in css for comment also you can use this element

div.moduletable h3,
div.moduletable_menu h3,
div.moduletable_text h3,
div.moduletable_hilite h3,
div.moduletable_menuhilite h3 {
background: url(../../images/red/dot-hilite.gif) repeat-y left #F7F7F7;
/*color: #Ffffff;*/
}

now you found this “/*” before of the color font tag and this “*/” after the font color tag these two elements are used when you want to comment a block not only a line of code.

and lets continue


div.moduletable h3,
div.moduletable_menu h3,
div.moduletable_text h3,
div.moduletable_hilite h3,
div.moduletable_menuhilite h3 {
background: url(../../images/red/dot-hilite.gif) repeat-y left #F7F7F7;
//color: #Ffffff;
color:#FF0000;
}

now or change is done and the line is comented if we must undone this is very easy in this way.

so i hope this little and easy tutorial helps

2 users say Thank You to shertmann for this useful post

1. ilp productions ltd
2. ak1design

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