College of Engineering Templates

Templates provide a quick and powerful solution for getting your content online with a clean, professional look. Creating pages takes less work because layout is already done. The templates on this site are developed by ITECS for use in the College of Engineering. The templates include different column layouts, and content moves easily from layout to layout. To get started, download the basic template (at the right ) and follow the installation instructions to set up your site.

Find out more about the ENGR Template

Announcements

Later today a preview for the college home page will go live. It uses the latest version of the template. The primary template has been updated and the interface has also been changed slightly to improve cross browser performance. 12/8/2006

As we roll the template out college wide new challenges and solutions come up weekly. The new template is by no means "finished" but it has progressed to the point that another release candidate is in order. This version is a significant break from earlier versions. It is the first to utilize centrally hosted resources. This means that the primary template download is remarkably smaller.

For users that wish to customize the style sheets and use custom media an additional interface download is provided so that they can create their own centrally hosted look and feel. In this new version only the templates need migrate from site to site, not all of the style sheets and images that go with them.

A new site for the engr template is also underway. This site will fully document the new version as it nears completion. 7/7/2006

A pre-release for the new template is now available. This archive is very close to the template that will be rolled out site wide over the summer. A few minor fixes remain to be applied, but the template has been tested and now works in the following Major Browsers:

Full style sheet support:
Internet Explorer 6 for Windows
Firefox for all platforms
Safari for Macintosh
Opera 8 for all platforms

Partial style sheet support:
Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh
Opera 6 and 7 for all platforms

Any other browsers that support CSS 2 reasonably, but have problems can be addressed with browser specific stylesheet fixes. Browsers with poor or no CSS 2 support (such as Netscape 4) can access the content in the template without a style sheet. Internet Explorer 7 support will be addressed when that browser is released, but the style sheet uses no CSS hacks so few if any problems are expected.

There have been significant changes to the layout at the top of the page. The Navigation area was completely redesigned to improve several usability issues and to address concerns with deploying the template college wide. The three column layout has also been completely rewritten for more reliable performance and the style sheet now utilizes separate WYSIWYG stylesheets so editing in Dreamweaver 8 and Conribute 3 can more accurately represent what will appear on the web.

These new style sheets also include media type instructions, so for media aware browsers there is no need to generate "printer friendly" versions of a document. The downloadable zip contains both a two column layout example and a three column layout. Documentation is under development. 5/4/2006

The preview release for the new template is available now. A detailed description of the design goals and planned features is also availalble.

The downloadable zip contains a single sample page with the CSS and graphics used to decorate it. None of the scripts that will be released with the template are included. While these will be a major driving force in making web sites using the template more accessible, usable, and manageable, the template certainly stands on it's own as a clean and professional looking presentation. The look and feel is belived to be more or less final, but that is not one hundred percent certain yet.

After further optimization has been performed and the scripts are ready there will be a beta release. 11/22/2005

A new CSS template is well under way. This version features a new look and will replace both the original Table based template and it's CSS counter-part. It provides a more flexible navigation scheme and has better browser support, including WYSIWYG display in Dreamweaver and Contribute. The new CSS template is more PHP driven and includes several dynamic features such as navigation highlighting and breadcrumb navigation. Customization of this version is easier due to a new box model that balances simplicity of code and nested boxes for style-ability. Implementation of this new template requires more PHP and CSS knowledge than in the past. Expect to see more, including a preview version in the next couple of weeks. 10/24/2005