What about CSS Sculptor 3?

[Joe Lowery]

We're in the planning stages for CSS Sculptor 3 and I'd like to hear what you'd like to see. I'll be sending out a survey later this week to a number of customers, but I also wanted to solicit feedback from the community in general.

Let us know what you think could be improved in Sculptor and what new features you'd like added. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Best - Joe
Joseph Lowery
VP of Product Management, WebAssist

P.S. If you'd rather not post publicly, drop me a line at jlowery@webassist.com

[iainmacdonald331081]

Hi Joe -

Just having a look for something else, and very good to see you using a vBulletin forum now!

Have just upgraded to CSS sculptor 2, and am mostly liking the built in support for faux columns, which should be a big time saver.

Not sure how typical I am, but I mostly use the tool as a starting point, which invariably gets customised to a greater or lesser degree - column widths, background colour etc.

A couple of little improvements that would be useful :

1. Make the generated / supplied background PNGs for the faux columns the original editable ones - that would make it easier to tweak the column widths and colours.

2. In layouts that use the background image for the faux columns, a matching background colour is also added to the rule for the columns - as this is a duplicate of the colour used in the PNG, would it make sense to drop it from the rule, so that if its changed in the PNG, that's it done, rather than having to edit the PNG and the column background colour?

Only little, but probably useful tweaks.

Cheers,
Iain

[Joe Lowery]

Thanks for the feedback, Iain. The background PNGs are generated on the fly, so there actually is no editable version available. The best thing to do is go in and reset your widths for a different page and regenerate the image.

And I think you're right about the bg color value being redundant. Thanks.

Let us know if anything else occurs to you.

Best - Joe

[web_assist_mail157665]

We're in the planning stages for CSS Sculptor 3 and I'd like to hear what you'd like to see. I'll be sending out a survey later this week to a number of customers, but I also wanted to solicit feedback from the community in general.

Let us know what you think could be improved in Sculptor and what new features you'd like added. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.



Said it before

Must have.....

System to create Content Boxes
Click where you need them added - set number to be added, margin, padding etc, - Click - Done!. Allow formating of content across box groups.
Allow more than one style of content box in the same content div (ie allow prefix to be added to box name to make them unique)
Not having this option is like being given a magazine layout where you have to use the same width for content on every page - can't stress enough how important this is.

Ability to style lists - both as Nav and in text - also include your new menu sytem at a discount rate to all purchasers of CSS S3

A Comprehensive UNDO system

Would also be nice - Look at supporting some sort of grid - take a look at 960.gs framework



atb

Paul

[MikeH]

I agree with Paul content box support this is a must I have managed them of a sort with v2 but an easier way would be a huge selling point.

[webmaster359615]

I forgot one thing when I took the survey: It would be useful if the CSS created could be revealed while still in CSS Sculptor to allow hand editing. User could then add properties not covered by CSS Sculptor as well as tack on our own styles.

[Joe Lowery]

Thanks for these detailed comments, Paul. As I think you've noted elsewhere, you can already add content boxes - divs - in Sculptor and set the properties, but it's one at a time. What if you could multi-select the added divs and set the properties all at once? Would that still give you what you want? Or is the ability to add multiple divs all at once just as important?

- Joe

[MikeH]

Personally I think to add mutiple divs at once would be useful also but it does sound good being bale to edit multiple divs at once if they are to be the same in most respects this would be an incredible time saving feature.

[steve89430]

The ability to create websites like this http://www.diversifiedtrust.com/services/overview.htm

where the footer remains fixed to the bottom of the page at all times no matter what the content. So when you add more content the footer moves down.

[Joe Lowery]

We already offer that option for any of our presets in CSS Sculptor 2.x.

Best - Joe

[steve89430]

I cant get it to work the content always goes below and under the footer If I add extra divs in to style the content how I want it.

[tony.smi379897]

It think it might be useful to have an 'eye-dropper' colour-picker. For example, I added a graphic to the header which shows up in the preview and it would be useful to be able to pick up a colour from that graphic, and from colours in the page design.

Tony

[Joe Lowery]

Any of the color pickers in Sculptor now have that ability. If you can see it in preview, you can sample it. If it's in another window, drag your eyedropper over to the window (keep your mouse down once you have an eyedropper cursor) and sample.

Best - Joe

[tony.smi379897]

I don't see an eyedropper, Joe.

Is that because I'm using the Expression Web version?

Tony

[Ray Borduin]

This is because CSS Sculptor v3 is not released yet. This is just a discussion about potential features for the next release. You are using version 2.

[web_assist_mail157665]

We have the ability to add new Divs

How do you get text into the divs to style?

thanks

Paul

PS - interface glitch - when you switch tabs - the selected div defaults back to the body - can't tell you how many times I've restyled the body when I've had another div selected and switched tabs - please keep the same div when switching tabs.

[Joe Lowery]

Right now, you need to add it manually after the page is created. Adding placeholder content optionally to a newly created div is a potential feature for the next version, though. Thanks for mentioning it.

I've noted your point about keeing the same div selected when switching tabs as a feature request. Thanks!

Best - Joe

[web_assist_mail157665]

hopefully at the same time - being able to remove sample text from divs


Lastly

insert new div - option to
insert under or
wrap children?

unless I've missed something - you can only currently insert under

atb

Paul

[Joe Lowery]

Yes, that potential placeholder feature allows you to toggle content on or off per div.

In your request to "insert under or wrap children" - you can already easily add multiple divs to any area and make them either children or on same level. If you just keep clicking Add Div, they go in as children and you can adjust using the "move left" button.

Is that what you were looking for?

Best - Joe

[pziecina2349400]

How about support for css tables, we now finally have them, so lets use them

[web_assist_mail157665]

Yes, that potential placeholder feature allows you to toggle content on or off per div.

In your request to "insert under or wrap children" - you can already easily add multiple divs to any area and make them either children or on same level. If you just keep clicking Add Div, they go in as children and you can adjust using the "move left" button.

Is that what you were looking for?

Best - Joe

Sorry Ray


missed answering this one


just as an example

you want to insert another 'everythingWrapper' div around 'outerWrapper'
can't see how you would do that as the closing div tag as is always inserted straight
after the opening div

or did I miss something?

[Joe Lowery]

The outerWrapper is the only tag you can't wrap anything else around. But that doesn't stop you from putting another div which contains everything else as a child of outerWrapper. You do this by using the direction arrows on the top right of the tree control.

Best - Joe

[Joe Lowery]

We're trying to keep Sculptor focused on layout, rather than other HTML elements. I'd be a little leery of including tables because I don't want to imply that folks should start using them for anything other than tabular data.

However, it is pretty cool what you can do with CSS and tables now, and it might fit into another of our products or perhaps be something new.

Best - Joe

[web_assist_mail157665]

The outerWrapper is the only tag you can't wrap anything else around. But that doesn't stop you from putting another div which contains everything else as a child of outerWrapper. You do this by using the direction arrows on the top right of the tree control.

Best - Joe

I will have another tinker

regards

Paul

[pziecina2349400]

Sorry if I confused anyone by my post about using css tables, but I meant the css display: table, for layout purposes not using css to style html tables.
These are supported by all modern browsers now, including IE8, and are nothing to do with html.

PZ

[lon.winters127646]

I would like to ability to edit layouts for existing pages.

[RobertB]

sorry, I have not read all the post...

But, it really causes me lots of unnecessary work everytime I open a custom preset where it refers to images it creates a new folder and assigns new file names for the images. I just want to refer to the image in my root folder and no subfolders and no renaming of files. Thanks.

[RobertB]

custom horizontal rule feature.

[Ray Borduin]

What do you mean by custom horizontal rule feature?

[maureen353022]

Just saw that placeholder text for new divs is being considered for the next version. Please, please, please add it. I'm going round and round tweaking and if I could just see it in preview...

The ability to add paragraph margins (spacing before or after a paragraph) would also be helpful.

[RobertB]

What do you mean by custom horizontal rule feature?

There is no option in sculptor to 'style' a horizontal rule by color or image.

[amyegc-a319132]

Although I've had CSS Sculptor version 1 for a while I've only just started using it more for basic layout. I think this is simple request. I'd like a comment added automatically at the end of each div to indicate which one it's closing eg.,
<div id="mainNav"> </div><!--end mainNav-->. Maybe version 2 already does this. It can get a bit confusing sometimes to find a closing tag without a comment.

[Justin Nemeth]

Amy, you can use Dreamweaver to navigate around your document to help with your issue. Open a document in code view, then look at the bottom of the code for a bar that looks like below. You can use that to select divs and the entire code chunk will be selected in code view for you.

[md360797]

could we have absolute and relative positioning included in sculptor v3

[codamedia]

I've been using version 1 since it came out, and recently upgraded to 2 which is much better - in speed alone.

1: Absolute and/or Relative. We need access to both.
2: Place holder text in new divs.
3: I'd like to see "color" and "layout" separated into two styles sheets, but that is likely just me :)
4: Ability to Save a Preset, and save the CSS files without creating a new html page.
5: On the Output Tab - why is the default to save the style in the document head. The whole point of style sheets is to save the layout in an external file. External StyleSheet should be the default, and allow users to choose the others if it is really needed.
6: CSS Tables! YES! These are not to be confused with HTML tables, and to be fair, I hate the name CSS Tables (should have been called "grids or something similar").
7: Retaining the chosen DIV when you move tabs :) This is currently a pain and the reason for many an error!
8: An easier way to edit the existing style sheet. I may be missing something, but I would love to have an edit button, rather than opening a new instance of CSS Sculture, hopefully grabbing a saved copy, and re-saving only to create yet another HTML file. Very reduntant.

Aside from those - I love this product. Very clean code that adapts to all browsers very, very well. Great job on this product!

[edrosenthal350859]

Sometimes I use prototype more than one menu on a page, and will manually remove the coding inside the navigation div to create a spot for the new menu. But i will almost always forget to remove any of the other coding; the link to the css menu file for example, and the coding in the <script> tags. Would be nice to have an option to push the extraneous code to a separate file, before the new menu code is generated. Talk about lazy...
Clutterbug,
eddie

[noahm26385458]

Absolute and Relative Positioning PLEASE

[bernardmkn361339]

I know these layouts are usually in Flash-based websites but layouts like this one http://www.jennlinkphotography.com/index2.php would be pretty cool to have.

[web_assist_mail157665]

Looks like another company was first with the content boxes

take a look at

http://www.extendstudio.com/product/flexipanels_css.html

[irn_bru346071]

Somethings I'd like to see in the new version of CSS Sculptor;

The option to edit existing CSS Sculptor pages without the need to save as a preset and open a new Sculptor page.

Combine CSS forms and menus within CSS Sculptor. Ideal to get a real feel for the full layout of a new site without the need to open three different extensions. Sculptor Pro anyone?

The option to create more than one page at a time would be nice. For example I use to Sculptor to create my home page then I'm handcoding sub pages where I'm looking for a similar but not identical theme. If you know what I mean?

Moving from tab to tab can be a little tedious. So it would be nice if things can move a little faster?

Lastly, it would be great if you could generate an extension that when you install an update, it doesn't require the user to delete the winfilecache.dat or delete their configuration folder. That above all drives me freekin crazy.

Still I love my Sculptor, saves me so much time and grief, not to mention a great learning tool.

[dsybot]

Hello. I wasn't sure what heading to post under, but I have a question looking for a simple answer:

If you look at my top page at http://www.ruffdraftdesigns.com under IE8, everything lines up fine, but if you use a public places with IE7 the content shifts out of its column and ruins the page display. How can I fix this?

I have all the WA extensions + now the subscription (?!) and I can't seem to do the first thing and get my top page to align with IE7. Which probably sends away a lot of my first time viewers. I always seem to detach templates and don't know if CSS Sculptor applies since you can't go backwards and reload pages taken out of CSS Sculptor and put them back into CSS Sculptor? Is that still true? Will it be true in CSS Sculptor 3?

Thanks for your help,
david

ps. I can't see anywhere to attach a file here in the forums so I guess you can look at the index.php source in your browser?

[Ray Borduin]

Please start a new thread with your question. This is not the appropriate place and this thread is already 5 pages long... not the time to start a new topic.