The fact is I know NOTHING about customizing my site, or any site for that matter! I have done a couple of simple things following some of the excellent tutorials floating around here! This is going to make it much easier for me to get my site like I want it
Looks very nice, I'll have to give it a test drive after backing up all my blood, sweat and tears manual customizations.
However, I can't help but think - All this, and still no way to disable the /iphone interface...
What does this have to do with iPhones? Mebellot, we have 10 Sorcerers on this team. The one that made Easy Customizer has nothing to do with iPhone stuff.
I'm a Power user. When reading this, under Power Account it says "Use your own domain name and branding". That's not the same thing as removing SmugMug branding?
I'm a Power user. When reading this, under Power Account it says "Use your own domain name and branding". That's not the same thing as removing SmugMug branding?
Correct. We've made it part of SmugMug Pro, that the SmugMug footer can be removed. And there'll be more bits like this, to come in the future.
Correct. We've made it part of SmugMug Pro, that the SmugMug footer can be removed. And there'll be more bits like this, to come in the future.
OK, thanks. The jump from Power to Pro is quite a large one so I'll play with this a while before deciding whether to upgrade. I'm about to significantly increase my use of this service so it should be fun.
Thanks again for providing such a well thought out feature!
I love smugmug. I wear my smugstrap proud! The people are great here as well. You care about your customers and well everything about it is great... except one thing imo.
This update is great and allows you to customize the site to an extent, but I think it would have been better if Smugmug went all out to make accounts similar to that of Photoshelter or something.
Easy custom pages, yet very sharp and professional looking portfolios. Im still not sure if I should use my smug account as a portfolio, even with this upgrade.
Easy customizer overdoing the CSS
I don't generally need the capabilities of the easy customizer since I can do my own CSS and HTML, but I did decided that I'd like to turn off the smugmug footer and I know of no other way to do that.
So, I went in to the customizer and that is the only change I made. Now when I look at the page you generate for me, I see a huge amount of CSS that has been inserted into my page setting all sorts of colors and fonts, and all sorts of stuff. Even worse, it has made them all !important so if I had already customized these, it will be whacking my own customization unecessecarily.
I don't want any of that. All I wanted to do was to turn off the footer. It seems to me that the easy customizer should be more granular, injecting only the minimum amount of CSS needed to control the things that have been explicitly set. As it is not, it appears to inject a big chunk of CSS if you touch anything.
Here's what it injects into my page (none of which is needed to support the single change I made):
I don't generally need the capabilities of the easy customizer since I can do my own CSS and HTML, but I did decided that I'd like to turn off the smugmug footer and I know of no other way to do that.
So, I went in to the customizer and that is the only change I made. Now when I look at the page you generate for me, I see a huge amount of CSS that has been inserted into my page setting all sorts of colors and fonts, and all sorts of stuff. Even worse, it has made them all !important so if I had already customized these, it will be whacking my own customization unecessecarily.
I don't want any of that. All I wanted to do was to turn off the footer. It seems to me that the easy customizer should be more granular, injecting only the minimum amount of CSS needed to control the things that have been explicitly set. As it is not, it appears to inject a big chunk of CSS if you touch anything.
Hi jfriend,
Good news, we are adding the ability to remove the footer (Pros only) from the Advanced Customization page very soon. That way folks who don't want to use the Easy Customizer can still get to this functionality.
The CSS that was generated by the Easy Customizer was based on what you published. Since you didn't modify the defaults, the CSS was generated based on those values.
The !important is added to ensure the CSS that the Easy Customizer generates works in as many cases for as many people as possible. As you know the CSS of the site is very complex and has evolved over the years. In order to ensure that what you see in the Easy Customizer preview is actually what you will see in as many live pages as possible now and in the future, we needed to use !important. Unfortunately there will be some people that already have extensive customizations that this may affect. The simple solution for these people will be to add !important to their CSS rules if they choose to use both the Easy Customizer and the Advanced Site Customization.
Good news, we are adding the ability to remove the footer (Pros only) from the Advanced Customization page very soon. That way folks who don't want to use the Easy Customizer can still get to this functionality.
The CSS that was generated by the Easy Customizer was based on what you published. Since you didn't modify the defaults, the CSS was generated based on those values.
The !important is added to ensure the CSS that the Easy Customizer generates works in as many cases for as many people as possible. As you know the CSS of the site is very complex and has evolved over the years. In order to ensure that what you see in the Easy Customizer preview is actually what you will see in as many live pages as possible now and in the future, we needed to use !important. Unfortunately there will be some people that already have extensive customizations that this may affect. The simple solution for these people will be to add !important to their CSS rules if they choose to use both the Easy Customizer and the Advanced Site Customization.
I hope this helps!
I'm glad you'll be exposing the hide footer feature without getting all the generated CSS because I don't want that stuff in my page. It just adds complication to CSS customizing that didn't need to more complicated.
I understand why you put the !important there. I don't agree with the design and where you're putting this CSS. Put it in a different place and !important won't be needed. !important really messes up CSS precedence and it's use should be limited to as little as possible. I would rather have seen you place this CSS after the theme so you didn't need !important and then give the user the ability to customize or override it if needed in their own CSS.
Also the whole business about the user's customizations being before the theme has just never been right. It makes it 400% harder for relatively new CSS users to figure out how to customize something. Now, you've complicated matters significantly more with all the !important stuff. To make a customization work, the user has to fight the easy customizer !important CSS and the them CSS. It's just getting messier and messier and more and more complicated. I do not think this was architecturally the right direction for Smugmug to be moving as things for people who do their own CSS just got more complicated and messier, not easier.
I don't agree with the design and where you're putting this CSS.
Hey John, believe me, this feature has been wrassled by Brian for weeks. Our CSS isn't the easiest beast - mostly because we allow so much freedom of customizing by our customers. Brian, with the help and consult from the rest of our engineering team, have come up with a solution that gets this much-asked-for feature in the hands of people now[/]... We're testing a few tweaks that'll get released this week and improve things even more for folks that use cobrand.mg as well.
But remember, we designed this feature for people that will never, ever darken the doors of the Dgrin customizing forum (and we know we have tens and tens of thousands of such folks).
If you'd like to hop on the phone with me and Brian anytime, just shoot me a note - we're not against trying to make do-able changes that would make more advanced folks life easier, too
Hey John, believe me, this feature has been wrassled by Brian for weeks. Our CSS isn't the easiest beast - mostly because we allow so much freedom of customizing by our customers. Brian, with the help and consult from the rest of our engineering team, have come up with a solution that gets this much-asked-for feature in the hands of people now[/]... We're testing a few tweaks that'll get released this week and improve things even more for folks that use cobrand.mg as well.
But remember, we designed this feature for people that will never, ever darken the doors of the Dgrin customizing forum (and we know we have tens and tens of thousands of such folks).
If you'd like to hop on the phone with me and Brian anytime, just shoot me a note - we're not against trying to make do-able changes that would make more advanced folks life easier, too
Thanks!
If we look at the simplest scenario which is users who use the easy customizer and never doing any custom CSS customization, it seems that you should make the easy customization 100% compatible with the themes. You control all the themes. You control all the easy customization. There should not be any incompatibilities between the two. Yet, the first thing you see when you go to the easy customization screen if you've chosen a theme is that there may be a conflict between the two. How is a newbie user going to have any idea what to do with that warning. They aren't. I think you should make it so a newbie user never sees that warning and never experiences a conflict between easy customization and their theme choice.
It seems to me that the default colors and fonts for the easy customization should be specified first in your core CSS (as the system default just like all other CSS defaults) and then in the theme itself (so they are 100% consistent with the themes). Then, if the user changes the color or font in the easy customization, then you override it in the additional CSS you add.
That whole warning about incompatability with themes could just go away.
And, you'd be putting a lot less CSS and using a lot less !important stuff because the default rules would already be in the page in the same location that defaults are for everything else in the Smugmug page (first in the core CSS, then in the theme). Without changing anything else, the only time you'd need to use a !important in your CSS override would be when the user actually changed a color or a font or something like that to make it different than the default. Merely turning something on or off wouldn't do any of what it does now. There would be no need for all this new CSS as it would already be in the page as defaults. The new CSS would ONLY be used to specify overrides of the defaults. IMO, this would be much cleaner and much more compatible with your current design of themes and would not require any significant architectural change, just putting the default rules into the right place and changing your EC generated CSS to only be things that the user has changed to be different than the defaults.
You want I should delay packages, or coupons, or 'virtual' galleries, or less pro branding on Pro site, or.. or.. or?
We did what we could do to get this incredibly important feature out in a v1 release.
Thanks!
That sounds a little defensive on your part.
You asked for my feedback (remember, you sent me a note asking for my thoughts on EC). So, I'm offering you thoughtful feedback on how it could be implemented in a cleaner fashion going forward. If you don't want that feedback, then just say so and I'll stop wasting my time on it. If you do want it, then I would assume that someone who understands the design options would digest my comments and offer some thoughts on them.
I brought this up because I think your current architecture for EC makes the whole customization world more complicated than it needs to be (and it's already plenty complicated) and it does not look to me like it was designed to be fully compatible with themes (and it could/should have been).
You asked for my feedback (remember, you sent me a note asking for my thoughts on EC). So, I'm offering you thoughtful feedback on how it could be implemented in a cleaner fashion going forward. If you don't want that feedback, then just say so and I'll stop wasting my time on it. If you do want it, then I would assume that someone who understands the design options would digest my comments and offer some thoughts on them.
I brought this up because I think your current architecture for EC makes the whole customization world more complicated than it needs to be (and it's already plenty complicated) and it does not look to me like it was designed to be fully compatible with themes (and it could/should have been).
Nope, not at all John I'm telling it like it is in response to your comments about themes and such. It's great feedback, and I thanked you for it. Keep it coming! We hope that we can wrassle all this CSS & Themes to make perfect sense to n00bs and CSS Gurus alike.
We'll get there, thanks again for posting your great comments.
First off - WOW! I love this tool. I never knew what all the mess in my css even meant, and now I can get rid of it and have things organized!! I look forward to seeing more tweeks and options in it in the future!
Now for the little problem I had- my text in my biobox used to be hidden, and now is not (it was just for SEO purposes) I saved all my CSS codes before doing this, and don't see anything missing that was related to this...but of course I might be wrong. Is there a quick little fix to this?
And one quick question - different titles for different pages - are they possible?
First off - WOW! I love this tool. I never knew what all the mess in my css even meant, and now I can get rid of it and have things organized!! I look forward to seeing more tweeks and options in it in the future!
Now for the little problem I had- my text in my biobox used to be hidden, and now is not (it was just for SEO purposes) I saved all my CSS codes before doing this, and don't see anything missing that was related to this...but of course I might be wrong. Is there a quick little fix to this?
And one quick question - different titles for different pages - are they possible?
Thankfully I did save my code! and I found it. I erased #bioText{display: none;} when I erased the previous banner I had. Don't know how I missed that. Sorry to take up your time. And I look forward to hearing about the Page Titles!
Nope, not at all John I'm telling it like it is in response to your comments about themes and such. It's great feedback, and I thanked you for it. Keep it coming! We hope that we can wrassle all this CSS & Themes to make perfect sense to n00bs and CSS Gurus alike.
We'll get there, thanks again for posting your great comments.
What I'm confused about is this. What is the expected interaction between EZC and your built-in themes?
Ideally, one would be able to customize on top of a theme without any issues. We'll get there, one day soon, I hope.
OK, so I guess making it compatible with all built-in themes was not a release requirement? That seems odd, but I guess that's what you chose.
My suggestion was for how to make the two compatible. Put the default EZC rules in the theme so the theme controls their look unless the user changes font, color, etc... in which case the EZC rules can override the theme in the exact same way as the user's CSS customization can. Then, it all works consistently and theme writers take responsibility for making EZC customizations work with their theme which is where that responsibility should be.
Is this new feature the reason that one of my Pro accounts has a new, unlisted empty gallery as of April 30, labeled "My Smugmug Site Files (Do Not Delete)" ?
If so... why does only one of the accounts have said gallery, and why do you want me not to delete this gallery? (I already have a user-created gallery for my Web design assets and don't intend to use this one.)
If not... is there a way I can get some information on the creation of this gallery; e.g., creator's IP address?
Is this new feature the reason that one of my Pro accounts has a new, unlisted empty gallery as of April 30, labeled "My Smugmug Site Files (Do Not Delete)" ?
If so... why does only one of the accounts have said gallery, and why do you want me not to delete this gallery? (I already have a user-created gallery for my Web design assets and don't intend to use this one.)
If not... is there a way I can get some information on the creation of this gallery; e.g., creator's IP address?
Yes, Easy customizer created it. It's entirely harmless, won't be seen by anyone but you. If it's empty, you may delete it. But we recommend leaving it
Is this new feature the reason that one of my Pro accounts has a new, unlisted empty gallery as of April 30, labeled "My Smugmug Site Files (Do Not Delete)" ?
If so... why does only one of the accounts have said gallery, and why do you want me not to delete this gallery? (I already have a user-created gallery for my Web design assets and don't intend to use this one.)
If not... is there a way I can get some information on the creation of this gallery; e.g., creator's IP address?
That's where Smugmug puts images that you specify for use with the EZ Customizer. I would presume that Smugmug auto-created that when you used the EZ Customizer. I also have two accounts and have only played with EZ Customer on one of the accounts and that's the only account that has the "My Smugmug Site Files (Do Not Delete)" gallery.
OK, so I guess making it compatible with all built-in themes was not a release requirement? That seems odd, but I guess that's what you chose.
My suggestion was for how to make the two compatible. Put the default EZC rules in the theme so the theme controls their look unless the user changes font, color, etc... in which case the EZC rules can override the theme in the exact same way as the user's CSS customization can. Then, it all works consistently and theme writers take responsibility for making EZC customizations work with their theme which is where that responsibility should be.
Great stuff John!
As I said, we opted for getting it out the door, because by far, the biggest thing new pros want to do asap is get their site customized, with no hassle. You should see the tears-of-joy stained emails we're getting at the help desk
Of course, there's work and improvements we can do. First round is in internal testing right now. Thanks!
Got it -- thanks, Andy and John! I don't recall using the Easy Customizer, but I must have clicked the link at some point.
While this isn't something I plan to use, I recognize the tremendous value of such a feature for many people. A happy, prosperous customer base is good for Smugmug, which is good for me as a customer. So thanks, Smugmug.
I also have two accounts and have only played with EZ Customer on one of the accounts
Hold the phone! Smugmug has an "EZ Customer" feature? Now, that should be a major selling point! Where do I click to activate that?
Comments
Thank You SmugMug
The fact is I know NOTHING about customizing my site, or any site for that matter! I have done a couple of simple things following some of the excellent tutorials floating around here! This is going to make it much easier for me to get my site like I want it
Sincere thanks,
Mike
FaceBook
However, I can't help but think - All this, and still no way to disable the /iphone interface...
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I'm a Power user. When reading this, under Power Account it says "Use your own domain name and branding". That's not the same thing as removing SmugMug branding?
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OK, thanks. The jump from Power to Pro is quite a large one so I'll play with this a while before deciding whether to upgrade. I'm about to significantly increase my use of this service so it should be fun.
Thanks again for providing such a well thought out feature!
Site customization. Turning on and off stuff to personalize MY site.
Making it "easy" would have been a bonus. Instead its just ignored.
This update is great and allows you to customize the site to an extent, but I think it would have been better if Smugmug went all out to make accounts similar to that of Photoshelter or something.
Easy custom pages, yet very sharp and professional looking portfolios. Im still not sure if I should use my smug account as a portfolio, even with this upgrade.
I don't generally need the capabilities of the easy customizer since I can do my own CSS and HTML, but I did decided that I'd like to turn off the smugmug footer and I know of no other way to do that.
So, I went in to the customizer and that is the only change I made. Now when I look at the page you generate for me, I see a huge amount of CSS that has been inserted into my page setting all sorts of colors and fonts, and all sorts of stuff. Even worse, it has made them all !important so if I had already customized these, it will be whacking my own customization unecessecarily.
I don't want any of that. All I wanted to do was to turn off the footer. It seems to me that the easy customizer should be more granular, injecting only the minimum amount of CSS needed to control the things that have been explicitly set. As it is not, it appears to inject a big chunk of CSS if you touch anything.
Here's what it injects into my page (none of which is needed to support the single change I made):
body { color: #ffffff; font-family: arial !important; } #customHeaderContainer { padding-top: 10px; margin: 0 auto; padding-left: 15px; padding-right: 15px; } .nav, .nav .title, a.nav, a.nav:visited, a.nav:active, a.nav:hover, .pageNav, a.down, a.down:active, a.down:hover, a.down:visited, .nav a.down { color: #ffffff !important; font-family: arial !important; } .title, #userName.title, #userName .title, #userHome.title { font-family: arial !important; color: #8CCA1E !important; } .boxBottom a, .boxBottom a:hover, .boxBottom a:visited, .boxBottom a:active, #albumDescription a, #albumDescription a:hover, #albumDescription a:visited, #albumDescription a:active, #displayPhoto a, #displayPhoto a:hover, #displayPhoto a:visited, #displayPhoto a:active {color: #A1A5A9; font-family: arial !important; } .description { color: #ffffff !important;font-family: arial !important; } .foreground { color: #ffffff; font-family: arial !important; } .updated { color: #ffffff !important; font-family: arial !important; } .boxTop { } .tempClass #bioBox .boxTop { } .alert, a.alert { color: #ffffff; font-family: arial !important; }Homepage • Popular
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Good news, we are adding the ability to remove the footer (Pros only) from the Advanced Customization page very soon. That way folks who don't want to use the Easy Customizer can still get to this functionality.
The CSS that was generated by the Easy Customizer was based on what you published. Since you didn't modify the defaults, the CSS was generated based on those values.
The !important is added to ensure the CSS that the Easy Customizer generates works in as many cases for as many people as possible. As you know the CSS of the site is very complex and has evolved over the years. In order to ensure that what you see in the Easy Customizer preview is actually what you will see in as many live pages as possible now and in the future, we needed to use !important. Unfortunately there will be some people that already have extensive customizations that this may affect. The simple solution for these people will be to add !important to their CSS rules if they choose to use both the Easy Customizer and the Advanced Site Customization.
I hope this helps!
Really ?
That was almost six months ago...
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I understand why you put the !important there. I don't agree with the design and where you're putting this CSS. Put it in a different place and !important won't be needed. !important really messes up CSS precedence and it's use should be limited to as little as possible. I would rather have seen you place this CSS after the theme so you didn't need !important and then give the user the ability to customize or override it if needed in their own CSS.
Also the whole business about the user's customizations being before the theme has just never been right. It makes it 400% harder for relatively new CSS users to figure out how to customize something. Now, you've complicated matters significantly more with all the !important stuff. To make a customization work, the user has to fight the easy customizer !important CSS and the them CSS. It's just getting messier and messier and more and more complicated. I do not think this was architecturally the right direction for Smugmug to be moving as things for people who do their own CSS just got more complicated and messier, not easier.
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Hey John, believe me, this feature has been wrassled by Brian for weeks. Our CSS isn't the easiest beast - mostly because we allow so much freedom of customizing by our customers. Brian, with the help and consult from the rest of our engineering team, have come up with a solution that gets this much-asked-for feature in the hands of people now[/]... We're testing a few tweaks that'll get released this week and improve things even more for folks that use cobrand.mg as well.
But remember, we designed this feature for people that will never, ever darken the doors of the Dgrin customizing forum (and we know we have tens and tens of thousands of such folks).
If you'd like to hop on the phone with me and Brian anytime, just shoot me a note - we're not against trying to make do-able changes that would make more advanced folks life easier, too
Thanks!
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It seems to me that the default colors and fonts for the easy customization should be specified first in your core CSS (as the system default just like all other CSS defaults) and then in the theme itself (so they are 100% consistent with the themes). Then, if the user changes the color or font in the easy customization, then you override it in the additional CSS you add.
That whole warning about incompatability with themes could just go away.
And, you'd be putting a lot less CSS and using a lot less !important stuff because the default rules would already be in the page in the same location that defaults are for everything else in the Smugmug page (first in the core CSS, then in the theme). Without changing anything else, the only time you'd need to use a !important in your CSS override would be when the user actually changed a color or a font or something like that to make it different than the default. Merely turning something on or off wouldn't do any of what it does now. There would be no need for all this new CSS as it would already be in the page as defaults. The new CSS would ONLY be used to specify overrides of the defaults. IMO, this would be much cleaner and much more compatible with your current design of themes and would not require any significant architectural change, just putting the default rules into the right place and changing your EC generated CSS to only be things that the user has changed to be different than the defaults.
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You want I should delay packages, or coupons, or 'virtual' galleries, or less pro branding on Pro site, or.. or.. or?
We did what we could do to get this incredibly important feature out in a v1 release.
Thanks!
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You asked for my feedback (remember, you sent me a note asking for my thoughts on EC). So, I'm offering you thoughtful feedback on how it could be implemented in a cleaner fashion going forward. If you don't want that feedback, then just say so and I'll stop wasting my time on it. If you do want it, then I would assume that someone who understands the design options would digest my comments and offer some thoughts on them.
I brought this up because I think your current architecture for EC makes the whole customization world more complicated than it needs to be (and it's already plenty complicated) and it does not look to me like it was designed to be fully compatible with themes (and it could/should have been).
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We'll get there, thanks again for posting your great comments.
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Now for the little problem I had- my text in my biobox used to be hidden, and now is not (it was just for SEO purposes) I saved all my CSS codes before doing this, and don't see anything missing that was related to this...but of course I might be wrong. Is there a quick little fix to this?
And one quick question - different titles for different pages - are they possible?
Thanks so much!
Rachael Ritchie
http://www.rachaelritchiephotography.com
EZC doesn't touch bio box at all... did you save your code? If so, paste it here and we'll help you re-set your bio box.
Stay tuned on your other request
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Thanks,
Rachael Ritchie
What I'm confused about is this. What is the expected interaction between EZC and your built-in themes?
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My suggestion was for how to make the two compatible. Put the default EZC rules in the theme so the theme controls their look unless the user changes font, color, etc... in which case the EZC rules can override the theme in the exact same way as the user's CSS customization can. Then, it all works consistently and theme writers take responsibility for making EZC customizations work with their theme which is where that responsibility should be.
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If so... why does only one of the accounts have said gallery, and why do you want me not to delete this gallery? (I already have a user-created gallery for my Web design assets and don't intend to use this one.)
If not... is there a way I can get some information on the creation of this gallery; e.g., creator's IP address?
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As I said, we opted for getting it out the door, because by far, the biggest thing new pros want to do asap is get their site customized, with no hassle. You should see the tears-of-joy stained emails we're getting at the help desk
Of course, there's work and improvements we can do. First round is in internal testing right now. Thanks!
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While this isn't something I plan to use, I recognize the tremendous value of such a feature for many people. A happy, prosperous customer base is good for Smugmug, which is good for me as a customer. So thanks, Smugmug.
Hold the phone! Smugmug has an "EZ Customer" feature? Now, that should be a major selling point! Where do I click to activate that?