template design Options

[pgchef1]

i am using template4 and would like to replace the generic images and text with my own designs. just how do i go about this? "for dummies" please. also, i originally uploaded template3 and then switched to 4. altho it reflects the change at my site the actual files still appear as template3 when i view the at my upload manager.

www.deantieleman.com

[Paul Wake]

i am using template4 and would like to replace the generic images and text with my own designs. just how do i go about this? "for dummies" please. also, i originally uploaded template3 and then switched to 4. altho it reflects the change at my site the actual files still appear as template3 when i view the at my upload manager.

www.deantieleman.com

I use template 5, but since no one else has responded, I'll take a shot at this and hopefully will be in the ballpark. Before you make any changes, you might want to back up your index.php file in a different place, so you can go back to the original easily if the changes you make don't work. You need to open "index.php" with a text editor (something like, in Windows, "Notepad"). The photo of the lady in the corner of your TNG home page is called "smallphoto.jpg," and it's a 71 pixel wide, 100 pixel high photo. You can either rename a photo you have so that it has that name, and upload the photo, or in index.php you can change "smallphoto.jpg" to the name of a photo you have and want to use, and upload that photo. You might want to resize the photo to 71x100, or change the dimensions in the HTML coding to match your photo's size. You can deal with the photo of the building the same way; in the template the default photo is named "bigphoto.jpg," and it's 300 pixels wide by 172 pixels tall. The text at the top of the page ("Our Family Genealogy Pages") is not actually text, it's a graphic ("title.gif," a 468 pixels wide by 100 pixels high graphic). Some people who want something different try to match the font when creating replacement graphics, although I suppose you could replace the image with text if you have a basic familiarity with HTML. See http://www.tngforum.us/index.php?showtopic=2414&hl=fonts for a list of fonts used to create various text-based graphics. You can replace the "Lorem ipsum dolor..." filler text with whatever you like by finding and changing it directly in index.php. I hope that's "For Dummies" enough. TNG has a steep learning curve. If it's ever to take off in a marketable way, these sorts of changes are going to have to be made easy, through the admin interface, so that people don't have to know HTML, PHP, and mySQL to use the program. But you can make it work, it just takes time and patience and sometimes a lot of fiddling around with things.

Paul
http://www.xmission.com/~wake/genealogy/index.php

[pgchef1]

I use template 5, but since no one else has responded, I'll take a shot at this and hopefully will be in the ballpark. Before you make any changes, you might want to back up your index.php file in a different place, so you can go back to the original easily if the changes you make don't work. You need to open "index.php" with a text editor (something like, in Windows, "Notepad"). The photo of the lady in the corner of your TNG home page is called "smallphoto.jpg," and it's a 71 pixel wide, 100 pixel high photo. You can either rename a photo you have so that it has that name, and upload the photo, or in index.php you can change "smallphoto.jpg" to the name of a photo you have and want to use, and upload that photo. You might want to resize the photo to 71x100, or change the dimensions in the HTML coding to match your photo's size. You can deal with the photo of the building the same way; in the template the default photo is named "bigphoto.jpg," and it's 300 pixels wide by 172 pixels tall. The text at the top of the page ("Our Family Genealogy Pages") is not actually text, it's a graphic ("title.gif," a 468 pixels wide by 100 pixels high graphic). Some people who want something different try to match the font when creating replacement graphics, although I suppose you could replace the image with text if you have a basic familiarity with HTML. See http://www.tngforum.us/index.php?showtopic=2414&hl=fonts for a list of fonts used to create various text-based graphics. You can replace the "Lorem ipsum dolor..." filler text with whatever you like by finding and changing it directly in index.php. I hope that's "For Dummies" enough. TNG has a steep learning curve. If it's ever to take off in a marketable way, these sorts of changes are going to have to be made easy, through the admin interface, so that people don't have to know HTML, PHP, and mySQL to use the program. But you can make it work, it just takes time and patience and sometimes a lot of fiddling around with things.

Paul
http://www.xmission.com/~wake/genealogy/index.php

hey paul, recently you gave me some advice how to change my template design. i resampled a photo to the 71x100 pixels of the small photo...renamed it smallphoto.jpg...uploaded it with cpanelx (which is the ftp program i am using to mage files)...checked off the box to replace old file...when i open my file manger and viewed the file it is the new photo..when i view my index.php file it only shows an blank box with an x where images should be...when i look at the actual public page it still shows the default image of the woman....any ideas????