[Vtigercrm-developers] Customer Portal Update

[Alan Lord (News)]

Hi all,

We've been using vtiger for sometime ourselves and have recently started 
promoting it to our customers too.

This got me looking at the Customer Portal in some detail.

I noticed that it is being rendered to the web using lots of tables and 
also had some nesting errors associated with that.

Using tables for data that needs to be displayed in a table is fine. 
Using tables for page-layout purposes is really frowned upon in the web 
design community and creates problems for accessibility users.

Seeing as the customer portal is an "outside facing" component of vtiger 
it is important that it should be as adherent to standards and 
best-practice as possible I think. So, I've spent quite a while 
re-working the code.

It is by no means perfect and I'm quite sure there's an opportunity for 
considerable re-factoring to remove quite a bit of duplicate code.

The file here:

http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com/vtigercrm-customerportal-5.1.0-tolc.zip

is our modified customer portal package. It uses a more modern doctype 
(XHTML 1.0 transitional) and is as valid as I can make it for the time 
being. I have replaced most of the tables used purely for layout with 
divs have removed most of the hard-coded styling and migrated this to 
the stylesheets so it is easier to customise to match the host's 
website. I've tested it with IE6, IE8, Firefox 3.0 and Google Chrome. 
The stylesheets are also separated to make the styling elements easier 
to identify.

I'm happy to continue to improve this part of vtiger on behalf of my 
company but would really appreciate some feedback on my efforts so far. 
We will be using this version on our website shortly.

Kind regards

Alan Lord

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The Open Learning Centre
Web: www.theopenlearningcentre.com