Customizing Squishdot (Part 2) 
Zope Development 
Butch Landingin 
butchland@yahoo.com 
1 
you-gotta-concentrate-really-hard 
This is part 2 on customizing Squishdot. This one discusses 
 the Topic Subjects Tab and the Image/TopicImage folders. 
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<H3>The Topics Subject Tab </H3> 
<P> 
The Topic Subjects Tab is the third tab on the management panel for 
 the Squishdot site. It controls what subject categories are available 
 for selection when adding or searching for articles. If not specified, 
 the topic subject field becomes a required input field when adding an 
 article.  
<P>  
You can associate an image url with each topic subject. This means you  
 can locate your topic images outside of the Squishdot folder although in 
 the default setup, the images are placed inside the Squishdot folder grouped 
 under the TopicImages folder and the url is entered as such. It is recommended 
 that for each topic subject, a different image be used so that as users become 
 familiar with the icons, they can readily decode the topic subject from the graphic 
 icon. 
<P> 
You can also choose not to use any images. Although the site would work, some elements 
 such as the topic subject menu bar that displays the associated image icons that runs  
 across the top part would not be displayed, as well as the graphic icon that appears on 
 the right part of the article summary on the main page would also not be present. 
<H3>The Images and TopicImages Folder</H3> 
<P> 
The Images folder contain those images that are used to display the rounded edges and 
 dropshadows that characterize the look and feel of Slashdot. They will need to be 
 modified if you plan to use color schemes which have don't use white/black as the  
 main backgrounds of the web pages.  
<P> 
If you don't plan to use dropshadows or rounded edges, then the images will not  
 be used. Otherwise, we have attached the images for the dropshadow and rounded edges 
 in a file attachment (images.zip) attached to this article. These images are stored 
 as  XCF (GIMP) formats so you can modify the background colors to match 
 your color scheme. 
<P> 
Other images in Image folder include the advertisement banner, the title image  
 (squishdot) and the blue/green dots that are used in the line at the bottom of the 
 pages. 
<P> 
The TopicImages folder contain the images used in subject topic. This is merely a 
 convenient place to put them. The recommended size of the images are 50x50 pixels.
<P> 
The next part will discuss the Properties page. 
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