Geeklog Forums

I'm building a new theme for my website and was hoping someone might have some ideas on a small challenge.

I have a different background colour (a grey) for both the left and right block columns as well as the top and bottom of the page. In the middle of this I have a white content area column. Now what I'd like to do is include a bevelling graphic around the outside edges of the white content area to blend things nicely.

However, the way the page builds under the current model if I insert this bevelling then referencing say any admin page uses the block templates with their dark backround surrounded by my bevelling which looks daft.

So....... if you follow all that, my question is - is there any way to wrap the storycontent area with this bevelling in such a way that it *isn't* displayed when it's not rendering a story list?

I reckon I'd need a template element that is called when a list of stories is displayed for this to work... but that's not how it's structured. Obviously I'm a little reluctant to go hacking the code as I'd have to replicate things every time a patch is released.

Nobody has any ideas then?

If you alraedy have the graphic made for your background, you may want to look at the CSS file and impliment the gif/jpg file tag in their someplace. I don't know if that helped or not. I would need more of an explaination of what you are trying to accomplish. Perhaps an html link to what your thoughts are in html and maybe someone can point out the correct place and coding for your needs.

Mike

Thanks for your thoughts. You can view a work-in-progress of my new theme work at http://dhaigh.dyndns.org. (I was reluctant to post this because it is very much a work in progress).

Ignoring the little issues with the heading widths that I'm working on, you can see the darker gray areas used around the (white) central story list area. I was looking to add a blending/bevelling around the four edges of the central white space. Easy to do you say.

However, while it looks good here, when you access any sort of say admin page like "Stories", or the Links page or whatever, GL draws the content of the page using the block-templates. These end up being drawn immediately inside my bevelled edging - and unsurprisingly looks silly. There-in lies the problem.

What I really need it to be able to do is to determine that it's in story-list mode and should thus draw the bevelled edging. Otherwise just carry on as usual.

But unfortunately the template structure doesn't support this type of behaviour. There's nothing between leftblocks.thtml and rightblocks.thtml. It seems the stories are drawn directly by code and they in turn call the storybodytext.httml templates etc etc. I guess I'm needing something in between that gets called when a list of stories is about to be rendered.

Hope this makes things clearer!!?