[Vtigercrm-developers] Customer Portal Update

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 24/09/09 08:21, Steven Sher wrote:
> I also had to try customise our customer portal to better suit our company, and found it rather complicated to get what we wanted, so thanks for all your work, I am sure it's going to save a lot of other people time/energy.

Thanks Steve,

I hope my OP wasn't misleading though, perhaps I could have been a bit 
clearer.

I'd really like feedback on what I've done so far. This isn't, what I 
consider, finished. There are some areas where the code can be cleaned 
up and still some bugs which cause it to fail W3C validation tests 
(mainly from some of the Javascript I think).

What I am really interested to see is if this rework is actually a 
worthwhile activity and I am on the right track; although the 3 comments 
so far seem to confirm the need for a clean up certainly.

Although I haven't really touched much of the actual logic in the code, 
the package is *not* endorsed by me for production use in it's current 
state.

Cheers

Alan

--
The Open Learning Centre
Web: www.theopenlearningcentre.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: vtigercrm-developers-bounces at lists.vtigercrm.com [mailto:vtigercrm-developers-bounces at lists.vtigercrm.com] On Behalf Of Alan Lord (News)
> Sent: 23 September 2009 06:36 PM
> To: vtigercrm-developers at lists.vtigercrm.com
> Subject: [Vtigercrm-developers] Customer Portal Update
>
> 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.