With a few more tweaks and a 100+ more entries, I have compiled a final version of the Pika 3.06 ~ CSS Matrix, with 238 entries sortable by HTML or PHP file name, markup tag; or id or class attribute.

And the point is…?

The first point was the original point, namely, to play with creating a sortable table. To coin a phrase, “mission accomplished.”

The second point was to go through the exercise of deconstructing what was done with Pika 3.06 to remove embedded styles from the application. It was fairly easy to do. With the Pika HTML templates, all it took was setting up a few basic search queries for character patterns that would lock in on id and class attributes in the structural markup. All I did was go through each of the HTML template files, do the queries, and plopped the results in the CSS Matrix table. In each instance, it only took a few minutes. Culling this same information from the PHP files was a little more demanding because my initial queries revealed how deeply and widely the Pika PHP files have so may pockets of code with embedded tags and attributes that are legacy or commented out or whatever, with no real connection to the current default Pika CSS files. So I took a different tack: I worked backward from the CSS files, searching the PHP files for any attribute referenced in the style sheets. This simplified the search to tags embedded in the PHP files with attributes with a connection to reality, i.e., ones affected by the CSS code in the danio.css and other style sheets. For purposes of the CSS Matrix, any other attributes were irrelevant. The 238 entries listed are all the ones I could find.

The third point is where I am going with this as part of LSNC’s various Pika test beds. We currently have four Pika installation:

• The real Pika install used by all LSNC staff.
• The Pika test install which duplicates the real install exactly, where we can test modifications and risk things blowing up before we fold changes into the real install.
• A virgin copy of Pika 3.06, essentially a reference copy of the current iteration so we can readily access an untouched copy of the current code and see it function as Aaron intended.
• And the Pika makeover edition, where we can experiment with our ideas for our next internal build of Pika.

One of the first sets of tests we will be doing with Pika 3.06 is to test out its new custom template functionality so that we understand how it works and can get comfortable with it. As part of that we will be using the CSS Matrix as one of the tools to mess with the Pika styles. It will be fun to see how hard we can push the boundaries of the presentational characteristics of Pika out of the box, only using the Pika style sheets. That’s where the CSS Matrix comes into play.

We’ll get back to you about that in a few weeks, provided the patient survives our tinkering.