It took me 3 hours just to change the look of the navigation menu.....
Basically I replaced the table structure by a <ul><li> structure. The difficulty was that the submenus needed to be inside the <ul> tag.
E.h.:
<ul>
<li>
<span>Main Manu Item 1</span>
<ul>
<li>Subitem 1</li>
<li>Subitem 2</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>
<span>Main Manu Item 2</span>
<ul>
<li>Subitem 1</li>
<li>Subitem 2</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
ideally this would have been just a CSS/HTML change or change of a template file.
But I had to change lots of files, such as BxDolMenu, BxTemplMenu, BxBaseMenu....
I think a lot of potentil customers are put off by the way Dolphin is designed and programmed.
All I can say it, please be more careful when writing the code and keep in mind customers may want to change the design in a more flexible way without interfering with the code.
At a certain point, there is always the question "make or buy", but if buying means making a major part as well, the answers tends to be "make"...... I am still unsure whether to continue trying to make Dolphin fit optically or whether to start from scratch.
I also think Dolphin should use a more "standard" way as far as templating is conerned. you really need to get used to those weird ____variable___names.
If you use a standard templating mechanism in the future, this would make things a lot easier - or also some MVC pattern.....CakePHP or whatever...
