In this section you will learn the basics of how to apply a site theme to your new install of bluApple. By default the theme that is installed on bluApple is the default theme. There are currently no themes created for bluApple but keep an eye out. Once this product has been out for a while, you will find that a lot of pre-built website themes will start to popup. somethingJava will do it's very best to provide some themes and allow posting of themes to the somethingJava site or the bluApple website but for now you have to create it yourself and this section will walk you though the right steps to apply the theme.

The default theme is the building block for creating your own theme. Copy or duplicate the folder default that is located in /themes/default/. Name your folder something meaningful for example:

    If your website was http://www.xyzSite.com then a good name for your folder would be /themes/xyzSite/
 

Once you have your own theme directory, structure and files created you can now start creating your theme. bluApple 2.0 uses a Coldfusion Custom Tag to display your pages. You don't really need to know the in's and out's of this custom tag but if you feel like poking around in it it's located in your website root folder and is called bodycontent.cfm. This file loads all of the information that builds your site and makes your pages well formed and search engine friendly. What you do need to know about it is that there are containers ( DIV Tags ) that you can reference in your CSS files. The main one is pageBody referenced by ID.

In the bodycontent.cfm file there are two includes that surround the pageBody div tag. This is the main place where you will start to build your website. The Coldfusion Include files are located in your newly created theme directory under the folder /bodycontent/. The files you will be editing are precontent.cfm and postcontent.cfm. There are also two files called header.cfm and footer.cfm. These files by default are not used but are available for you to do a Coldfusion Include in your pre and post content.cfm files. Edit your pre and post content.cfm files and put your website structure in these files. Keep in mind that these wrap around the pageBody div tag and all of your content from Pages and Content created from the system will be injected into the pageBody area. So design your HTML accordingly.

To keep your website nice and clean, I do suggest that you build your website using CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets ) which is now an industry standard. One setback I've come across my years of development is the fact that designing with CSS can be tricky with all the different browsers. There is always a way to make everything cross browser compliant, but realistically it can be a real pain in the butt. Thus, I've created a system in bluApple to manage CSS Tweaks. See the sections CSS Tweaks for more extensive information about this. For now what you need to know is that in your themes directory there is a CSS folder /themes/[your theme]/CSS/ There is a file default.css which is your main Style Sheet for your website. When you open it it will be blank as you are responsible for building your own CSS file. However, once bluApple has been out there for a while, we are hoping that you might be using one of the many available base themes that we provide in which this file will have a foundation of CSS to start you off. By now you have probably noticed that there are several css files in this directory. These files are browser specific CSS files that only get loaded when a specific browser and even browser version is detected by bluApple. This makes for easy tweaks for specific browsers. See CSS Tweaks for more info.

In HTML (including XHTML), the span and div elements are used where parts of a document cannot be semantically
described by other HTML elements. Most HTML elements carry semantic meaning – i.e. the element describes, 
and can be made to function according to, the type of data contained within. For example, a p element should
contain a paragraph of text, while an h1 element should contain the highest-level header of the page; 
user agents should distinguish them accordingly. However, as span and div have no innate semantic 
meaning besides the logical grouping of the content, they can be used to specify non-standard presentation 
or behaviour without superfluous semantic meaning.