Big market for this , suggestion to the Design Team

[behzad]

This is to the Design Team and Xara. Right now there is a big demand for custom themes to be used with Joomla, Word press and other CMS programs.

Xara already has a great program that can create websites but imagine if the features of Web designer allowed for the output to be taken straight to word press or other cms programs.

This is something that will being xara a lot of business. Right now Artisteer has something similar but with Artisteer one can not design the website layout from scratch the way xara allows.

I hope the developers at xara are already looking into this. Please don't allow other companies to jump ahead of you guys.

Regards.

[pauland]

The thing that makes Xara software easy to use for novice web developers - absolute positioning, slicing of text into seperate divs and rasterisation of web page sections - are the things that make it very difficullt to use Xara software for building CMS web templates. The only way to use Xara software for CMS templates is by bypassing many of the features that makes Xara web design possible and switching to code snippets that effectively delegate the layout and control back to traditional HTML sections.

People have integrated Xara designed html files with CMS systems but it's not something that is ever going to fit together comfortably.

[slavelle]

I am with Paulland on this. I wish it weren't that way, but there is such a huge divide between these two packages, I don't know how there could be an absolute connection between the two.

I have done some custom stuff with Xara and Joomla! and Wordpress. Xara's still great for creating the graphics, but getting the actual templates created for any of these CMS sytems straight from there is just no do-able right now. Again, I wish it were - it would make my life a LOT easier if I could have the best of both of these worlds.

Look into a few of the the "frameworks" for Joomla and you will see why it would be so difficult for Xara to get into this game - each one is its own universe of layout and code snippets. A lot of it won't even make sense until you really study the PHP and HMTL involved.

Anyone have an ideas or insights on how to simplify any of this, I certainly would appreciate it!

[behzad]

For less than $50 I can have my xara design converted to be used in word press. I hate wasting money and yet this is a cheap way but what if that could all be with a click of a button. Hey as I mentioned artisteer does it. Why not xara.

[pauland]

Hey as I mentioned artisteer does it. Why not xara.

Artisteer generates designs customising the page using standard HTML and CSS. It is not a free-form designer that allows absolute control of placement and the ability to layer just about any seperate graphics and text into any design that you wish including features that include layouts with text repelled by irregular shapes.

Xara achieves it's flexibility by rasterising text into graphics under some circumstances and by slicing up text into seperate components.

The important differrence is that Xara effectively rasterises the page at the design stage using the actual content that you have at the time, while tools such as artisteer and CMS-based HTML templates work very differrently - they rely on the browser rendering the output in a consistent way using content that changes rather than being fixed. This means that all of the clever work that the xara guys do to take your design and build a wysiwyg html page from the design cannot be done for content that changes "on the fly" because the HTML generated by Xara is intended only to replicate the design at the moment of page generation rather than content that changes after publishing.

Typically, people use html code snippets to allow them to write HTML solutions that bypass the standard Xara rasterisation techniques and allow the use of dynamic text (or other) content. In using code snippets you effectively take control of layout and style issues yourself and have to have the skill to do that and hope that what you do doesn't visually mess up the rest of the page generated by Xara software.

How can artisteer do this trick then? Well artisteer will be usingHTML and CSS to control layout and appearance - taking control of a layout design calculated to use HTML and CSS rules to maintain a consistent layout with variable text. This customisation flexibility with variable content comes at the expense of design freedom, because it takes skill to design sophisticated HTML/CSS layouts, so products like artisteer will provide perfectly usable options for page designs, but it won't have the flexibility that Xara gives in design.

So the problem with using Xara software for CMS-based applications is that the Xara software is based on designing pages using the available content at that moment and the custom page generation fits around that and is not adaptable to changing content except through site regeneration via the design software. Artisteer and similar products take design layouts based on CSS rules that will adapt to variable content and present these layouts for customisation by the user rather than allowing the user to build anything they wish. So Xara and HTML template based design software work in very differrent ways.

In short Xara is all about WYSIWYG by knowing what content you have and giving you a HTML page to represent that precisely. Other design software is about generic design that is adaptable to differrent content but doesn't have the design freedom that Xara gives.

None of this is a criticism of the Xara software. With Xara you get page generation that reflects any design you make. With artisteer you customise pre-arranged layouts that are designed to accommodate variable content but without the design flexibility that Xara gives. These are two very differrent options.

[edit:

I might as well add that artisteer and similar products either use CSS to control layout or possibly HTML tables. In CSS you establish a relationship between blocks of content, providing ules about how the contnt should be positioned by the browser. The browser will then adapt the layout according to the rules in the CSS. The CSS are not based upon the actual content inside these blocks and so the whole layout is then adaptable to differrent content.

Xara doesn't use CSS rules based upon content blocks but generates fixed position content that represents content as it is at design time, not what it might become later, consequently it's difficullt to adapt the HTML generated using such a scheme to generic content.]

[behzad]

Thank you for your extensive explanation. I appreciate your input. However then would it be possible to design the site with xara and out put as html, afterward have someone convert the files that are outputted to a cms word press?

[pauland]

Thank you for your extensive explanation. I appreciate your input. However then would it be possible to design the site with xara and out put as html, afterward have someone convert the files that are outputted to a cms word press?

Xara already outputs the file as valid HTML - all websites are HTML. You can already have a Xara design converted to HTML for $50. That is an easier approach than hacking the output that Xara produces and in my estimation a bargain price. A hand-crafted HTML/CSS template from a graphic design will always be better than a hacked version of Xaras HTML.

I've tried my best to explain how differrent the approaches are between Xaras HTML generation and that which is required for integration into a fully-featured CMS. It's really difficullt to explain more without an understanding of the HTML and CSS involved. I think I've failed!

Your request is entirely understandable and reasonable. I'm just trying to point out there are very big technical obstacles to Xara providing the solution you want given the way the product currently operates. It's not a case of Xara missing an opportunity, I'm sure.