Wikidot Community

Making theme adjustments via CSS can be very infuriating,

In some ways I disagree. It can be infuriating because CSS sometimes appears to not do what you want or expect (although there is always a reason). But using CSS in Wikidot is very straightforward. If you put your CSS on its own page on a site as I describe in the howto at http://community.wikidot.com/howto:flexible-css-putting-css-on-its-own-page then you can edit your CSS and have access to the history of a page and can rollback to earlier versions of the CSS with no problem.

Also, using Firebug (an addon for Firefox) makes life so much easier when you are testing and debugging your CSS.

Yes you do need to learn CSS but this is an invaluable skill and well worth the effort.

I appreciate the effort you went to with the long post but am not sure it will provide much assistance to people new to CSS with Wikidot - it's a bit dense with text. There are lots of how-tos at http://community.wikidot.com/howto:_start with screenshots which will help with getting to grips with CSS and themes. Perhaps you could contribute a how-to where there is a gap?

I never learned it formally either but by starting slowly and just changing one or two things you get to know what each bit does and where things have cascaded from. One way to make it easier for yourself is that if you use Firefox get hold of the Firebug add-on from here. What this does is to open a CSS editor on your screen and you can try different things on the fly. It helped me greatly in learning the structure of the different CSS files.

When you create a custom theme (site manager ->appearance -> custom themes) it's also a good idea to keep your CSS in a file called something like css:theme. Don't forget to start the page with the [[codetype="CSS"]] and [[/code]] at the end. You then import that on the custome themes page. I have found it helps to make editing the CSS easier and quicker.

Like you I had wanted to change the image at the top of the page. I was using the localise theme and changed it to this.

If you've got any particular problems with CSS there are plenty of people here who will help. Give it a go, it's quite fun.

Rob