A custom block should only contain the inside of the body.
Xoops takes care of all the rest.
In other words, only the lines marked X below:



Most of the other things you mention, should be in your theme's css file - and the javascript preloader should be in your theme.html.

An alternative is to insert an iframe into your custom frame. Then you can load a full and seperate html page into it.

Good luck.

Okay just to make sure:

1. stuff between the tag should be in the header of the theme.html file, as well as the call to the preloadImages function.

2. everything in should be in the block itself.

3. I am confused as to what I mentioned that might go in the CSS file.

Sound good? Thank you for your help, I was getting quite confused here.

EDIT: I am doing something wrong still. While editing theme.html I noticed a

I was wondering if that $xoops_js is an indication that maybe I need to insert this javascript into the database to be called into existence here. Or it might just be some default xoopsJavaScripting that wasn't meant to be changed.

If you are just trying to make one custom block, and want to insert static code in there, then the easiest would simply be to insert all the code (slightly reordered) into your custom block. I'll show how it's done further down.
Note, you can't have two blocks made this way - as they will share javascript function names and only one of them will persist.

If you, on the other hand, wants to make themes, based on your Imageready output, then you need to understand some more code and you need to edit more files.

If you look at the body tag example you gave a few postings ago:


Here the bgcolor, leftmargin, topmargin, marginwidth and marginheight are all css elements, related to the entire pages body - not just the block.
If you want to make those changes to the entire site, then you should change it in your themes css file.

The onload property, will trigger the preloader once the entire page has been loaded - it will then load all the images needed for the mouseover function in the background. If it's for a theme, then you want to put it in the body tag in the themes html file.

Finally, the javascript part of your output. It's not written very clever, nut nevertheless you would probably want to put it in a seperate javascript file, and link to it from inside the themes html file.

About your questions regarding the <{$xoops_js}> this is where XOOPS loads the javascript functions thats available from the XOOPS system. You could add a link to your javascript file next to it.

Still, the very very easy way, is to stick all of it into the block.
I've reordered the code and have added URL's to make the code testable from here. Try to add all of this as your custom blocks contents:


I hope this clearifies a bit for you.

Yay it works!!! Cheers!

Thank you for taking the long way around to explain as well. I did just copy your revision in wholesale, which works great! But now I do want to take the extra steps to learn what's going on under the hood of xoops. And I'll start fiddling around with your other suggestions of moving the scripting elsewhere. Hopefully learning some more along the way. Once again many thanks. And cheers!

It's good to know it's working for you.

A small amount of knowledge is the key to a huge amount of knowledge. (Just add a bit of work to the formula!)

Good speed...