Chameleon v1.0 - The Complete CSS Theme Solution for Geeklog

Chameleon is a combination theme and plugin for Geeklog v1.4.1+.  The theme is
a pure CSS based theme.  One of the major hurdles for a pure CSS driven layout
in Geeklog is Geeklog's ability to dynamically have 3, 2 or 1 set of columns
display at any given time.  This problem has been solved with the customized
functions.php file included with Chameleon.


The benefits of using a pure CSS theme is that it is far easier to "theme" a
site using CSS (just use a different CSS file) than using HTML tables.  This
is where the plugin side of Chameleon comes into play.  Also, using a pure CSS
driven layout, the content is always sent to the browser first, followed by
the left / right columns.  This means that mobile devices or systems that do
not support style sheets will always see your site content first.  This is
also optimized for search engine friendliness as well.

The plugin allows the site administrator to choose from several different
styles for four of the major areas of your site; page layout, menu, blocks,
and colors.  It also allows you to easily upload a new logo for your site,
or use a text-only site name, and also toggle the visibility of the site
slogan.

Keep in mind that the goal of Chameleon is to give an out-of-the-box solution
to folks who want to setup Geeklog as their CMS and give them the ability to
easily customize the look and feel without having to crack open the template
or the style sheet.

There are 17 different page layouts to choose from, including 7 fluid width
and 10 fixed width layouts.

There are 12 different horizontal menu options, along with the option to align
the menu to the right or left.

There are 3 different block styles to choose from, with the ability to choose
options independently for left and right blocks.

There are 8 different color schemes, 4 light and 4 dark, with dominant colors
including Blue, Green, Purple, and Red.

This gives you over 88,128+ different styles you can achieve from a single
theme simply by making selections from Chameleon's layout configurator.  The
benefit of the plugin is that you don't have to actually make any CSS changes,
this is all done for you automatically.

Of course, if you want to go directly to the style sheet and templates to
accomplish your design goals, there is no requirement that you use the plugin
interface.

We believe this is the first step in bringing Geeklog into the CSS/XHTML
world.  The next step will be to remove all the markup from the source code
and get it into the templates.  Once this is done, it will make it possible to
move to XHTML which opens up additional opportunities for visual enhancements.

-Mark Evans & Eric Warren