Cobranding

Mike Lane

I hate to be negative, but the cobranding on smugmug sucks ace :pissed. On the cobranding help page you mention that you are revamping the cobranding process. I also read in these forums messages from early 2004 that you are planning on rolling out a revamped cobranding process.

So the big question is, when is that going to happen? In my opinion, you need to do something akin to what the blog services have done. Use templates and template tags.

Sorry, it just seems ridiculous to me that paying members are so limited on their ability to manipulate the look of their site.

{JT}

Yes, cobranding is due for an overhaul and it has been talked about for a while. There will be a lot more hooks in the new templates for pros to take advantage of using CSS. But I must say that I have seen some amazing sites that have really taken advantage of the existing code ...

Mike Lane wrote:

I hate to be negative, but the cobranding on smugmug sucks ace :pissed. On the cobranding help page you mention that you are revamping the cobranding process. I also read in these forums messages from early 2004 that you are planning on rolling out a revamped cobranding process.

So the big question is, when is that going to happen? In my opinion, you need to do something akin to what the blog services have done. Use templates and template tags.

Sorry, it just seems ridiculous to me that paying members are so limited on their ability to manipulate the look of their site.

Aaron Wilson

how about flash?
need to add flash intro's lol... here is my flash page if you care to look.. but flash the front then into the standerd web page would be kewl...

Mike Lane

{JT} wrote:

Yes, cobranding is due for an overhaul and it has been talked about for a while. There will be a lot more hooks in the new templates for pros to take advantage of using CSS. But I must say that I have seen some amazing sites that have really taken advantage of the existing code ...

When will that cobranding overhaul happen?

Let me voice my frustrations with the cobranding. If you look at my site (www.mikelanephotography.com) with firefox you see the title graphic (a transparent .png), if you look at it with i.e. you do not. I have some javascript code that would correct i.e.'s faulty handling of .png's while ignoring other browsers; however, I can't implement it correctly because the cobranding sucks so much.

Here is that code. The reason that it won't work is because the way it's written, I have to have the "if" call outside of the <script> tags and I cannot do that with smugmug's cobranding. I know for a fact this works because I have it implemented on my blog. See for yourself at http://atease.blogspot.com.

<!--[if gte IE 5.5000]>
  <script language="JavaScript">
 function correctPNG() // correctly handle PNG transparency in Win IE 5.5 or higher.
    {
    for(var i=0; i<document.images.length; i++)
       {
 
 	  var img = document.images[i]
 	  var imgName = img.src.toUpperCase()
 	  if (imgName.substring(imgName.length-3, imgName.length) == "PNG")
 	     {
 		 var imgID = (img.id) ? "id='" + img.id + "' " : ""
 		 var imgClass = (img.className) ? "class='" + img.className + "' " : ""
 		 var imgTitle = (img.title) ? "title='" + img.title + "' " : "title='" + img.alt + "' "
 		 var imgStyle = "display:inline-block;" + img.style.cssText 
 		 if (img.align == "left") imgStyle = "float:left;" + imgStyle
 		 if (img.align == "right") imgStyle = "float:right;" + imgStyle
 		 if (img.parentElement.href) imgStyle = "cursor:hand;" + imgStyle		
 		 var strNewHTML = "<span " + imgID + imgClass + imgTitle
 		 + " style=\"" + "width:" + img.width + "px; height:" + img.height + "px;" + imgStyle + ";"
 	     + "filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader"
 		 + "(src=\'" + img.src + "\', sizingMethod='scale');\"></span>" 
 		 img.outerHTML = strNewHTML
 		 i = i-1
 	     }
       }
    }
 window.attachEvent("onload", correctPNG);
 </script>
 <![endif]-->

That isn't my only source of frustration; but right now, it's a major one. So when do you think the awful cobranding will be fixed?

Mike Lane

Okay, as an update, I fixed the site by making the image that I wanted to have a transparency a more narrow jpg. I found some other solutions for dealing with transparent png's on the internet, but when I looked at my site in ie, the png would show up for a second and then go away. Apparently there is some kind of problem with smugmug and png's .

Mike

{JT}

OK, first - I can't give out any time estimates as to when we will launch new feaures. I would rather have everyone be pleasantly surprised one morning with new features, than watching a date or time that could be wrong. I can only say that the wait will be worth it, I promise I have poured all of my experience into making sure that everything is controllable by CSS, so the possibilities are limitless if you know what to do with it all.

Second, have you looked at our source code? We already provide PNG support for IE in our header:

<!--[if gte IE 5.5000]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.smugmug.com/include/js/pngfix.mg"></script>
<![endif]-->

<style type="text/css">
img {
   behavior: url("/include/pngbehavior.htc");
}
</style>

You can check out some of our PNG graphics too. The fancy arrows that appear in the Elegant style are transparent so that they will work if you change the background of your site, and those work in IE (even in WinXP SP2, since MS changed how the PNG hack could work). So theoretically, your image should work. I will take a closer look in the morning at what the problem could be, but I bet if you try to remove your code it will work.

REECEPHOTO

Man one day I'm going to have to take a HTML class beacuse I don't understand a word Jt just said.
That being said I'm sure glad we do have flexabilty to change things to our pages.

For you HTML gurus when you do something to your page and like it and have a little free time on your hands please post it in (baby) terms how you did it with a link to your page. And maybe over time some of us HTML nobodys will pick up a few things. Thanks......................

EMC

still learning cobranding
we would like to have LINKS to custom pages (example instead of posting my BIO on the front page, would like to have a link to open it on a different page). We know how to do "linking", but how do we create the page ? (do we create it in SmugMug or in a web tool on the PC and push it?)

Ben

EMC wrote:

we would like to have LINKS to custom pages (example instead of posting my BIO on the front page, would like to have a link to open it on a different page). We know how to do "linking", but how do we create the page ? (do we create it in SmugMug or in a web tool on the PC and push it?)

Well, first off, you can't host extra pages on smugmug. Basically, if it is not your homepage or gallery pages... you won't be able to host it on smugmug. You could host it on another site and link to it... but I have a suggestion for what I consider to be a better way.

Create a gallery and lock it to Journal style (in customize gallery settings). Then upload a picture to it that you like, and use the image caption section to tell your life story. A great example of this is: http://barbaramadvinphotography.smugmug.com/gallery/407017