Dragos Rizescu
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Hello Artisteer community!
I made this forum topic to say my impression about this program and to see if other people share the same impression with me or not.
I bought this program about 4 months ago. Saw a link towards it, navigated the artisteer.com a little bit, and then clicked purchared and got it.
What can I say. I was naive... I really wanted to develop Drupal sites, and I had no idea how to html, css or php.
The first impression that I had when I opened the products was a pretty good one I could say. On that time 2.6 (I think) was the recommanded release. I was glad that I could import templates with just one click. Also during my experience with Artisteer I've managed to discover other CMS systems such as Joomla.
After spending a considerable time thinking about the looks for my Drupal website, the first theme template was out. I upload it fast to my web server, then start building the site. At that time I had a vague idea how Drupal works, refering to Drupal 6.
I get my way around with the blocks, modules, and so on, but the more I get into this, the more I realize how bad Artisteer made my theme. One of the things that annoyed me the most was the big ammount of useless code, that it would increase the loading of the pages up to 50%. In this one the most annoying was the spam of:
<div class="art-post-tl"></div>
<div class="art-post-tr"></div>
<div class="art-post-bl"></div>
<div class="art-post-br"></div>
<div class="art-post-tc"></div>
<div class="art-post-bc"></div>
<div class="art-post-cl"></div>
<div class="art-post-cr"></div>
<div class="art-post-cc"></div>
All of these could be avoided with a simple:
<div class="top></div> - put the top shadowed image here on the CSS, background-position: fixed;
<div class="main"><div> - contains the content, add shadowed for margins here with a simple: backround-repeat: repeat -y;
<div class="bottom">< - with the bottom shadowed image.
Using this instead if clears up the page of useless code, and also makes it properly viewable on Ipod/Iphone/Ipad Safari.
Other code that was useless was in common-methods.php. Honesly now...
That's just a little of the code that was useless or just wrong. I could give you more and more examples.
Other Artisteer feature that annoyed me was the retared way of making the page.tpl.php.
Same goes for last version of Artisteer for Drupal 6 and 7. But since I paid for this software, I thought that it doesn't have to be this hard to 'fix' it.
Blowing my head, losing nights in a row, I've got to the idea that Artisteer is a bit useless, and I started doing templates my own, the old school way: PSD -> HTML + CSS -> PHP.
Although if I say that Artisteer is completely useless I would lie. In fact because of this software, I've learned the basic coding languages for a website. Also Artisteer came up pretty useful when designing a theme fast to get an idea about the final result, then trim it in Photoshop.
I have to add this, Artisteer is a good program. It has it's ups and downs, but overall it's a good program. With a little work implemented this could rule the internet. A code clean-up would really improve it.
Some features that need to be implemented:
> be able to define top, bottom, right, left borders, margins, paddings;
> fully customize article headers, footers;
> add more buttons cutomizations;
> define a page (apart from the article one) just for the content flow, not the sidebars;
> define diffrent styles for content types (ex: define a diffrent style for comments in Drupal);
> jquery menu / sliders
> be able to define impute formats
This are just a few ideas that came in my mind.
This is my Artisteer review.
Thanks for reading!
Best regards,
Dragos Rizescu
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Garry
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The code you are referring to is not useless, it is used to create rounded corner boxes around posts, you can remove it anytime by selecting without border layout from: Articles-> Styling -> shape-> without border layout.
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Digital Raindrops
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Hi Dragos,
The reason artisteer uses the images is compatibility across all CMS products and legacy browsers back to IE6.
They could use:
border-radius:8px 0px 8px 0px;
-moz-border-radius:8px 0px 8px 0px;
-webkit-border-radius:8px 0px 8px 0px;
box-shadow: 2px 3px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
-moz-box-shadow: 2px 3px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
-webkit-box-shadow: 2px 3px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
But this is not supported in legacy browsers, and as Gary said the h and v images are clipped to allow for rounded corners.
"Out of the box" and for the money Artisteer is a fair investment for anyone with a small uncomplicated website, that is about 99.99%, it gives an easy way to keep tweeking the theme or template.
Look at Artisteer as a business, it is not freeware, developers and designers are likely a very small percentage of the Artisteer customer base, but a high percentage of recurring revenue (renewals), so it is a financial balance between new and old revenue.
Priority of any software house that services (adds on) to third party products like the CMS's is keeping the software working and current to the CMS products, this has more priority that adding features and R & D.
Artisteer is a one size fits all, so it has features that are compatable across all CMS platforms.
If we take WordPress it does add in support for some plugins like wp-pagenavi, but for sliders it only give a widgitized area so we can add a slider widget, if we need to add a slider call in a page then we have to edit the file.
As different CMS versions are released and Artisteer catches up, they add in some not all new features, if someone was using an unmodified Artisteer generated theme, they can just open and re-export to keep up to date.
I was talking recently with someone that lost three days traffic, and had to wait three weeks to have a theme rebuilt, when they upgraded the CMS thier 5 year old theme stopped working due to deprecated calls.
If they had Artisteer they could have kept the theme current, and avoided any downtime, that is where Artisteer has it's market strength.
David
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rob rudan
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I've begun my Artisteer experience very shortly after creating my first Wordpress site, and I have to say that using a CMS like Wordpress completes through widgets with what Artisteer does not come with "out of the box".
I am a total noob when it comes to site design, but I've managed to come up with a credible site that while lacking what a real pro would come up with, still works well though with very minor deficiencies (not directly related to my design capabilities) that only I am aware of.
If I could suggest an add-in, that would be for Artisteer to provide some form scripting capabilities along the lines of Instant Form Pro. I'd pay a few buck extra or if it was part of the Pro package, maybe spend the extra to upgrade to that.
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Paul
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Dragos, you have logically defined why you think Artisteer has its shortcomings. Did you read the posting covering what Artisteer Is and Isn't?
I personally think that Aristeer is a major life saver and rates as one of the best pakages that I use.
It allows the techie to manage the good looks and allows the newbie to manage wonderful effects that one could never write in CSS or HTML.
IMHO you can gone too deep into the code and have covered areas that Artisteer would probably state that they are not going to address, although I pull my websites together in Artisteer and then tweek the code in CoffeeCup HTML Editor.
Each to their own i suppse and well done with all the work you have done.
Cheers
Paul
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