Howdy, Dogsters!
This is a special pre-relaunch message just for those pawple who use CSS, HTML, or JavaScript to customize the appearance of your pet pages and group pages.
Since the beginning of the redesign process, we’ve tested all our changes against custom pet and group pages to make sure they won’t affect your beautiful work, because we love what you do. Also working with us have been the leaders of Pawsome Pages, who have had full access to working beta versions of the new site. Aren’t they good secret keepers? 😉
If you have customized your pages, there are four things you’ll need to know when the new version of the site goes live next week.
1. The tools we offered to customize the top nav and bottom nav colorations will no longer work. You are more than welcome to modify the CSS before we can make this functional again, but please know that for now, the previous methods of customizing your site headers and footers won’t take effect anymore.
2. If you are one of the VERY FEW people who have made top images for your page to fit exactly 966 pixels wide, you might find that your image tiles for an extra 14 pixels on the relaunched site, because we have widened the body of the pages to 980 pixels.
After long discussions with the Pawsome Pages team, we agreed that 980px is a better width in the long run, but if you want to revert to the old measurement, simply embed this CSS at the top of your very first extra bio field.
<style type=”text/css”>
#wrapper,
#row_Findsection {
width: 966px;
}
#dmg-footer {
width: 922px;
}
</style>
3. A small number of you use the “!important” flag in your CSS, which is very powerful and overrides any other setting. In our site relaunch testing, we spotted a few problems in the font faces and coloring in the top nav buttons and footer nav links. That said, it will be quite simple for you to change these by using the new div names for those sections. We’ll post more on this after the relaunched site is live.
4. The last and most important thing to know is that because we allow all members to embed almost any HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, or applets modifications, it’s simply not possible for us to pre-test every last scenario on every browser.
So all we ask for is your understanding that while we won’t be able to resolve everything right away, we are working hard to fix everything that is technically possible to fix, and that some of those fixes might take a couple of weeks or more. While we often know right away what the problem is and how we want to resolve it, we then have to QA it against everything else in the site or cluster it with some other revisions.
Please know that we will be listening to and reviewing every pawson’s postings, whether we ask for more details or don’t respond at all. We will be aware of every issue that arises and will be working to make them all no-issues. It may take us a week or two or even three, but have no fear: We’ll resolve everything that is technically possible.
I’m so sorry this was so long. I wanted to make sure I covered everything.
Here are some final preparatory notes:
1. We’ve already set up a Group to keep you updated about when the relaunch is live, and to talk about how it’s going for everyone.
2. Pawsome Pages will also be a great place to hear about what’s new.
3. Don’t forget that the old frames_id.js hack has been sunset for new development and support. Pawsome Pages has guidance on the much better new ways to make the magic happen.
Image courtesy of Dogster member Zoe.
