Firebug has saved my butt . . .
I’ve been working on a Drupal Theme Design for a new site we’ll be launching probably within the next couple weeks, and with the new templating for Drupal version 6.+ there are many different places the css comes from, especially if you’re dealing with subthemes and multiple folders.
I had remembered a friend who templates Joomla a lot mentioning that he’d never find his way through the maze of files if it wasn’t for the Firebug extension for Firefox. I gotta tell you, this tool has saved me so damn much time I can’t begin to tell you. You simply open it, then you can drill down through the html to the element you need to style, and it will tell you ALL the dependencies in order, what file they’re in, and what line number in the file.
Most of my wordpress themes tend to only have one stylesheet and they average between 300 and 400 lines, so it’s never been a huge issue. But when you’re dealing with 5 or 6 stylesheets and some of them are in excess of 700 lines, and there are overrides and an order they load in, you HAVE to use firebug. I can’t imagine doing this Drupal template without it.
Some of my friends who write a lot of javascript and ajax goodies also swear by it for the same reasons. It has lots of debugging stuff too.
So if you’re working on some complicated templating, you might want to hook up with Firebug. You’ll be very glad you did.
[tags]Firebug, CSS Debugging, CSS dependencies, Multiple Stylesheets, Web Development tools[/tags]
May 13th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
To True! To True!
The feature I like best is being able to try out a style fix live, then go back and add the appropriate code in the sheet without having to edit then proof, edit then proof.
Great tool. What a time saver.
Validates the XHTML too!!!!
May 13th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Speaking of Firefox extensions:
Another good one is screengrab.
It lets you grab a jpeg of a whole web page.
Not the print version and not the part that’s just in the viewport, but the whole page.
Good way to send a style to a client for proofing!
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:13 am
I’ve used FireBug a few times but Parrothead is right. Screengrab is a great tool. I use it constantly to send data to clients. They appreciate being able to just look at the info, rather than having to go to a website and check it. It saves them time, and that’s what they pay me for.