Meryl's Notes Blog

Boy, this was a fun one to write as it’s been a while since I’ve created CSS from scratch. Most of the time I start from a template and modify it for my needs. Read Creating CSS from Scratch @ InformIT.

I’ve done a lot more designing in the last few weeks than I have in the last couple of years. I built not one, but TWO Web sites for my kids’ school PTAs. Thanks to Nucleus CMS, it has made it possible and easy to build and update the site. My volunteers have no trouble adding new entries. My biggest problem, however, has been figuring out what “categories” to use — these make up the main menu. I’ve requested feedback from parents, but they’re a silent lot.

I still like and use MovableType. In fact, I’m working on updating my site from MT 2.6x to 3.2 as soon as the beta clears out the bugs. I believed Nucelus would serve these two sites better and I am happy with my decision, but the community is not as involved like MT’s community. MT has an amazing community with many volunteers and MT employees helping one another.

I wanted to implement multiple categories / tags since an entry can often fall into multiple categories and I want to cover all the bases. I got the plug-in working and can select multiple categories, but I could not make them appear in the entries or the archives. I use this skin as the base for the two Web sites without the theme chooser and other tweaks.

I also added WebCalendar because we wanted a calendar where you could enter events and see the dates they occur. Any entries entered into Nucleus and dated for the date of the event won’t appear until the DAY of the event. Parents need more notice than that. WebCalendar did the trick. Customizing the look and feel of it has been difficult and time-consuming, however.

By the way, this site is also undergoing redesign, but I have help this time. My plate is overloaded.