KELVIN SMITH LIBRARY

Blog Branding: Loading The Stylesheets

Once you've built those first two modules you'll want to prepare the ground by installing your stylesheets. Being the cautious coder that I want to be I left the old stylesheet in place and made plans to work around it. That made it possible for me to discard a lot of stuff from the default template that just didn't map over to the new, branded template.

Working from the "Templates" page again, you'll be creating three new templates in the top-most set of files. These will be your general stylesheet and two media based stylesheets for print and screen.

For each of these new stylesheets you'll want to have a copy of the coresponding file from your department web site. Basically, with only minor modification, you'll be using what you've already built. In fact, it is entirely possible to use the stylesheets directly from your departmental site. Those of you who are comfortable with using off site stylesheets via a LINK tag in the HEAD of your document template can go ahead and do that. I'll be linking in the stylesheets in the a near future post about configuring your Index template.

Create 3 new templates similar to these:

Template Name	Output File
Case CSS (Advanced Cranberry)	case_adv_cran.css
Case CSS (Print)	print.css
Case CSS (Screen)	screen.css

Into each you will paste a copy of the existing code from your coresponding stylesheet from your departmental web site.

A Couple Of Things To Check

Open your main CSS file (the Case CSS (Advanced Cranberry) one in my examples) and scroll down to the definition for the .masthead class. Check the URL for your background-image to make sure it is correct and complete. You may serve that image either from its existing location on your departmental site, or you can use the Upload File interface to load it to your blog and adjust the address accordingly. Do whichever works best for you.

Next Steps

• Sidebar and Footer content
• Configuring the Index template