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How to use CSS Inspection Tools

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These docs are now deprecated, we have a new Support area located here

Revision as of 22:08, 13 November 2011 by Poseyg (Talk | contribs)

When using PagelinesPro it is often necessary to modify the CSS to achieve the desired look and feel of a site. There are a couple of FREE CSS Inspection Tools which can be used to do this. They are Firebug and Google's Chrome Inspection tool.

Contents

What is CSS?

  1. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
  2. Styles define how to display HTML elements
  3. Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
  4. External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
  5. External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files
  6. Go to http://www.w3schools.com/css/ to find out more

CSS Solved a Big Problem

HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a document.

HTML was intended to define the content of a document, like:

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

When tags like , and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.

In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file.

All browsers support CSS today.

Installing Firebug

Install Firebug
Install Firebug

From Mozilla Firefox:

  1. Go to http://getfirebug.com/
  2. Download and install the Firebug extension
  3. Once installed you will see the Firebug icon in the upper right-hand corner of Firefox.

Using Firebug To Change Padding of an element

Selecting elements
Selecting elements with Firebug

From Mozilla Firefox:

  1. Go to your site
  2. Click on the Firebug icon in the upper right-hand corner of your browser
  3. Click on the Inspection icon on the Firebug interface
  4. Next, click on the section of the page to be inspected
  5. Upon clicking any element you will see the corresponding HTML and CSS code highlighted in Firebug
  6. Copy the CSS code you are wanting to change
  7. Return to the Pagelines Settings and select "Custom CSS"
  8. Paste the CSS code that is being altered into the Custom CSS section
  9. "Save Options" and refresh your browser to see the changes

Using Google's Chrome To Change Padding of an element

Selecting elements
Selecting elements with Chrome's Inspection Tool

From Google Chrome: (The CSS Inspection Tool is built into Chrome)

  1. Go to your site
  2. Right Click anywhere on the page and then click "Inspect Element"
  3. Click on the Inspection icon on the bottom row of the Inspection interface
  4. Next, click on the section of the page to be inspected
  5. Upon clicking any element you will see the corresponding HTML and CSS code highlighted in Firebug
  6. Copy the CSS code you are wanting to change
  7. Return to the Pagelines Settings and select "Custom CSS"
  8. Paste the CSS code that is being altered into the Custom CSS section
  9. "Save Options" and refresh your browser to see the changes

The CSS Hierarchy

When a webpage loads there is an order (hierarchy) by which the CSS of a page is loaded.

  1. The site's "style.css" will load first
  2. The "dynamic.css" will load second
  3. The modifications in the "Custom CSS Section" will load next
  4. If the "Customize Plugin CSS" is activated, it will load last

It is important to keep this hierarchy in mind because the CSS that loads last will take priority over any CSS loaded before it.

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