Another Pika design refresh

In no particular order I have posted some representative screenshots of Pika Reborn 2008, an intentionally overstated reference to LSNC’s current experiments with a wholesale rebuild of the Pika 3.07 templates and external stylesheets. (The gallery is flash-based; if you right click an image, you can load a full view of the original screen capture into your browser.)

Working on this modest redesign has been a preparatory exercise for our in-progress updating of our existing version 3.04 install, to fold in the Pika features added since that version, plus integrate additional code changes for custom functionality and modules we want to add to our particular Pika martini. We hope to have our final rebuild completed shortly after the first of the year, and it should look something like this new design. The great advantage of taking a few months to do this “rebuild” experiment is that we were able to try, re-try, adopt, abandon, etc., a number of different solutions for how we want Pika to look and feel and function.

As for the redesign illustrated here, the short version is this:

• All the Pika structural markup was rebuilt, from scratch.
• All embedded and inline styles were stripped out of all HTML template and PHP files.
• All tables used in Pika 3.07 for layout and/or positioning of page elements were stripped out.
• Tables were retained solely for displaying tabular data, e.g., displaying case lists, search results and so on.
• All Pika image elements were replaced or eliminated.
• The default Pika external CSS (cascading style sheets) implementation was dropped and a complete rebuild of external styles was undertaken. This new redesign relies on about 50% less CSS code than was used three years ago for the Project Claire design.

Ya gotta love the Pika. (We do.)