There are several frameworks in wordpress that have very nice live CSS tools. They are commercial GPL and you may be able to borrow from them. I have a license two a couple if you are interested. they are very well done:
Headwaythemes
Catalyst Dynamik

May at least provide some inspiration.

S.

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I'm not really using WordPress these days so can you tell me what modules you are actually thinking about ?

sonicthoughts’s picture

sonicthoughts commented

If you look at http://headwaythemes.com/ or http://catalysttheme.com/ these are two approaches to a WYSIWYG theme builder which basically provide a live css editor. Although WP and Drupal are vastly different, it may be instructive (inspirational???) to see their approach. The software is also GPL although they typically charge for a license. WP community is a totally different world and there is a lot of GPL / Commercialware. Anyway, I don't have anything specific but I can tell you they are very powerful tools for the CSS neophyte. Let me know if you are interested in brainstorming this as I have licenses for both.

jimmb’s picture

jimmb commented

Along these lines, I installed and tried out Sweaver yesterday. Prior to doing so, I watched the "Basics" and "Real live example" videos. I sure like this concept! However, there were a few things that I think you might want to consider changing...:

  1. There appears to be no way to clear out what you've done prior to saving, which was a big usability problem for me. The first thing I tried was changing the color of the hover state in the (Sky) theme's main menu tabs to green. My initial selection in Sweaver of a tab and the color ended up turning a whole bunch of things green. At that point, I couldn't find a way to clear that out, so I had to plod through all the affected elements manually (sometimes needing to repeat a change multiple times for it to stick). Finally I got it back, but wasn't sure if it was truly back to the original state, or if I ended up adding code in order to make it seem like its initial state. The fact that I couldn't simply get back to the initial state in an easy way was -- to me -- very aggravating.
  2. Once the module is enabled, you're on an admin page which doesn't trigger the Sweaver module. So I spent a little time looking around in the admin area for a way to activate it! Turns out that you just need to navigate to a non-admin page on the site, and Sweaver appears automatically. While obvious in hindsight, I think you could mention this somewhere (anywhere!) on the project to save confusion for the new user
  3. I also take slight issue with the first sentence in the project description: "... completely changing your Drupal theme without knowing any CSS." I would argue this is not true, since you need to know some CSS to understand what you're selecting (with all the options available). That description makes it seem like any neophyte can easily apply this module successfully. My experience (as someone who is intermediate at CSS) is that it *is* somewhat confusing to know what you're doing in this module, and knowing CSS definitely helps.

Of course, points 2 and 3 are more like suggestions. But I really feel that #1 is !important. Perhaps I'm missing something, in which case please let me know.... Otherwise, I'll keep my eye on this module and be interested to try it again if (at least) this feature is added.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented
Status: Active » Fixed
Issue tags: +ToDo

Thanks for your suggestions. For the number 1 there is actually a built-in solution. You just have to activate the advanced plugin, you'll see there a tab called watchdog which list all modifications done lately. However I think it is yet too complicated too use (that is why it's in the advanced plugin ^^) so I'll add soon buttons "undo" "redo" in the editor.

For the rest I'll see what I can do in the documentation.

Thank you for your support :)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.