SiteGrinder

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SiteGrinder is a commercial plug-in made by Media Lab Inc. It converts website designs made in Adobe Photoshop directly to HTML/CSS.

SiteGrinder is available for Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

Features

Hints

The user attaches special words, called "Hints", to layer names in Photoshop. These hints tell the plug-in about specific functionality of layers, layer groups, and layer comps.

Standards Compliance

SiteGrinder produces XHTML 1.1 compliant HTML and CSS. User-added code is not affected.

Web Images

Image and shape layers are converted to web graphics and positioned on the resulting web pages. SiteGrinder tries to eliminate redundancies and merges layers to minimize download size.

Styled Photoshop Text becomes Styled Web Text

SiteGrinder converts Photoshop Type layers directly into styled CSS text on web pages. Photoshop character and paragraph styles are preserved along with their settings. Text can optionally scroll and have multiple hyperlinked words and phrases.

Buttons with Rollovers and Popups

Text, Image, and Hybrid buttons can have rollovers, and popups by adding the hints "button", "rollover", and "popup" to the end of layer names or layer group names.

Rapid Image Portfolios/Galleries

SiteGrinder has features aimed at creating web image galleries. These include automatic thumbnail and thumbnail navigation generation, automatic sequential navigation button programming, support for custom layouts for different image aspect ratios, thorough support for metadata inclusion on pages, and creation of multiple galleries from a design. As of version 3.1, the Site Grinder forum on the main website has had a few people not able to get this function to work properly.[1]

Multi-Level Menus Without Programming

SiteGrinder can create menus and submenus from text layers, graphical layers, or a combination of both. The "-menu" hint, added to a 5 line type layer for example, creates a five item text menu.

Multi-page Creation

SiteGrinder generates multiple pages in a single pass. Buttons automatically link to pages whose names they share. Page content is determined using Photoshop's layer comps feature.

Email Forms and Generic Forms

SiteGrinder 2 Pro employs a straightforward way to define multiple form elements in a single Photoshop type layer. PHP and CGI email forms are supported, as well as generic forms.

Background Colors & Tiles

SiteGrinder 2 supports custom background colors for different areas of your pages. SiteGrinder 2 Pro adds a variety of background image tile features, including vertical and/or horizontal repeating tiles and "fixed" background images that remain in place as content scrolls on top.

Flash slideshows Generation

SiteGrinder 2 Pro can create animated Flash slideshows from folders of jpeg images, choose different transition styles, durations, and assign hyperlinks for each slide.

Inclusion of External Media

SiteGrinder 2 Pro supports inclusion of multimedia content( such as Flash, Animated GIF, QuickTime & Windows video, and MP3 music are supported media types. Users can also link to media from remote locations over the internet.)

Resize Resistance

SiteGrinder 2 Pro can create page areas which adjust vertically on the fly if the browser changes font sizes or if content is edited after SiteGrinder builds the pages. "Footer" elements positioned below these areas will move up or down as needed to accommodate the new size.

Support for PHP, In-Line or External HTML

SiteGrinder hides the complexity of HTML and other web infrastructure, but for maximum adaptability SiteGrinder 2 Pro does allow advanced users to add arbitrary code to their pages wherever they like. SiteGrinder 2 Pro can intelligently import folders of HTML files when it builds to create a huge number of pages from a single page design.

SiteGrinder supports various server side markup, including HTML Object, PHP, and Apache SSI. This allows sitewide content like navigation menus to be kept in a single file. An edit to this file will alter every page that imports this file at page-load time.

Version History

SiteGrinder is, in a way a sequel to PhotoWebber and PhotoWebber 2 application software also from Media Lab.

SiteGrinder 1.0 was released in January 2005

SiteGrinder 2.0 Basic & Pro was released in May 2006

SiteGrinder 3.0 Platform with eCommerce and Control add-ons released in April 2010

External links

References

  1. ↑ http://www.medialab.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8077
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