Comments on: Review of SmugMug Template Customization

by: Jim

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:38:11 +0000

Very nice overview of the complications to Smugmug customization. I tried to look and tinker with my SM site via CSS and was in way over my head. I did notice the 1300 lines of code and had a very difficult time trying to figure out what overrides what. Thanks for taking the time to share this with the folks at SM. Folks at SM, thanks for taking the time to read it and respond.

by: JT

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:52:33 +0000

Hello BJ,
I am in fact the designer/developer in charge of the html and css at smugmug. Thanks for taking the time to write such an excellent post. Don covered most of what I would tell you, but in case he missed a few things I would be happy to discuss via email or here. I too have questions about your post that I would love to go over.

Thanks,
JT

by: bj

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 04:08:11 +0000

Don, I’m glad to hear from you and will be communicating with you by the end of the week. The next couple days will be nuts, so it won’t be right away. I’d very much like to give you my opinion of how this could be improved.

Re the css– The best advice I can give you is to run it through the css-discuss mailgroup and let them critique. I will warn you, they’ll be even more brutal than I was. And those pixel defined font sizes are guaranteed to start a holy war.

by: Don MacAskill

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 03:49:11 +0000

Hey there,

I’m the CEO & Chief Geek at SmugMug. GREAT writeup, and we’ll definitely take much of this to heart as we continue to re-work and improve the site.

Alas, I didn’t write any of the CSS, and barely any of the XHTML (I do write almost all of the backend software that does the heavy-lifting for generating it, thanks for your kind words there), so I can’t comment on that. I’ll make sure the guy who does, though, replies here as well.

I have a couple of quick notes, though - every single CSS and JS include on SmugMug is heavily cached and heavily compressed, so 1300 lines isn’t actually as painful as it sounds - that ~20K (ugh!) file is sent >99.9% of the time as a ~2.3K file. And, also >99.9% of the time, it’s sent one time only and perfectly cached for every single other hit. So even for modem users (you’d better believe we test and profile modem users), it’s negligible on the first hit, and almost nonexistent on subsequent ones.

Feel free to test that out and make sure I’m not missing something - but we heavily test the speed, compression, cachability, and performance of our pages on both broadband and modem.

Also, all of our IE6 hacks are JUST for IE6. We’re already testing the site for IE7, and everything (so far) works perfectly. I’m sure we’ll have to adjust something before we’re done, but the IE6 hacks don’t apply to IE7 unless we want them to (or overlook something) - they’re IE6 specific in the code. The are *not* in the stylesheet that all versions of IE will use (there’s no such thing as a static stylesheet at SmugMug - they’re all generated dynamically based on browser & other details).

One of the reasons things were designed the way they are (again, someone else did the actual design) is that a huge # of our customers just want to change the color of the background or a font. So, to them, they prefer overriding a stylesheet to do just that one thing.

I’d love to hear some more detail on exactly what you’d like to see (maybe a checkbox for “I brought all my own CSS, don’t use any of yours?” where we provide a very minimal stylesheet instead of the whole thing?), though, to see if we can improve. Drop me an email.

Thanks,
Don