dashCommerce

In IE7, a space of about 4-5px appears below the masthead image and above the menu bar. The gap does not appear in Firefox3 beta5. I prefer the look without the gap. You can take a look here: http://www.AquaticsToGo.com/default.aspx

I'm not a CSS rookie... I've used the IE Developers Toolbar to drill down and attempt to see what styling is being applied. It appears to be the SkipLink, but I can't figure out where it's styled or how to fix the problem! I've tried adding a new style for #ct100_siteMenu_SkipLink with height, margin and padding set to 0, but no luck.

Any guidance???

I found it! In case anyone else is struggling with the same issue, here's the solution:

In site.master, around lines 41-42 are these two lines:

<asp:HyperLink ID="hlLogo" runat="server" SkinID="sitelogo" />
<div class="contentMenu">

What you need to do is strip out the spaces between the two lines, so it looks like this:

...and the space disappears!

Cool. I checked out the site - Beautiful. I had a 75 Gallon Reef Tank for about 5 years. It was a PITA - but man was it fun to look at. I promised myself a long time ago I would do it again when I could "do it right". Nice site. Inspiring.

Thanks very much! As you can tell, it's still a work in progress, and I still have a number of small questions about how dC should be used to make things work properly... my questions pertain to How To Set Up Shipping (title is Shipping?) and How To Set Up Multiples of The Same Item (title is Multiple Items?)

I expect to be able to get the rest of the product line onto the site next week, at which point I'll resume styling it. Hopefully, those questions will be answered and we'll be able to take the site Live soon!!! The client is Very Excited! I think once somebody writes a document about How To Use dashCommerce, it will become the de facto standard of eCommerce programs for the ASP.NET platform - most especially if you move it forward into the newer version of VS2008 and ASP.NET 3.5.

Yitzchok came up with an outstanding document outline for dashCommerce, but it would be too big for 1 or 2 people to tackle. We are thinking about how to get the community involved in helping to document the system. If folks from the community took a small topic and detailed how to use it, it would be a really nice document. We are looking at having it available in html / chm format, so it could be installed right along with the product.

I would love to see that document! Any chance of that?

I don't think I know enough about any part of this program yet to be able to tackle a topic. I'd be happy to edit some of the topics as they were completed, if that would help...

Part of the outline is in the new dashCommerce Project - dashCommerce Documentation that you can get from the subversion repository here:

http://mettlesystems.svnrepository.com/svn/dashCommerce/trunk/dashCommerce_Documentation/

There is a post on this in the Announcements - all the details are there.

I'm feeling dumber than a red brick here, but nothing I click on at that link resembles documentation as I know it! It all seems to be code.

???

You're not dumb - its a project for creating documentation - although with some help, there is nothing preventing someone without coding experience from helping to document the system - you just have to know where to put the information.

Thanks for the vote of confidence! However, it still makes no sense to me.

Could you or someone please explain what one has to do to use this mechanism?

It's another Visual Studio solution. So, to be clear - there is no documentation in there right now. Although there is a partial outline. The idea is to have the community fill out the documentation, so, in order to use this, you need to install DocProject and it's prerequisites (namely Sandcastle and some others). Once you download the solution, you can open up some of the topics and add content. The trick in the beginning was figuring out how to add images and such for conceptual documentation (there is an example in there on how to do it). These files are just .xml files, however, once you build the solution, the output is a DocSite - or a web site that has all the documentation (in html) - conceptual and API.

Right now, I have left off the dashCommerce assemblies as building it takes a long time (10 minutes +) with the assemblies referenced. Without, it's pretty quick.

So, for folks wanting to help with the documentation, the process is much the same. Generate your content and upload a patch to CodePlex and we'll review it and integrate it in. If you are on the Core Team, then it's just another solution.

Aahhh!!!   I definitely do NOT feel dumb anymore - that process was definitely NOT intuitive (to this brain anyway!) and seeing it explained made a lot of sense! Thanks! Will give it a try at the first opportunity!!!