Pop Up Notification Customization

I know there is probably a simple answer, but I'm not entirely comfortable digging into source code I'm not fully familiar with. I'm trying to do a little custom work on the look of the popup notification for new emails. All design stuff, no real programming changes. However, I am trying to have the popup fade in while the rest of the page fades to a black screen at about 75% opacity. I normally know hoe to do this, but I'm wondering where I need to put the black background div. I am also looking to change the User Menu link to the inbox to reflect the number of unread messages (E.X. "Inbox (34)" or, if there are no new messages just "Inbox". Suggestions? I have a general idea, but again I don't like poking into other's code if I didn't have a hand in writing it, too many unknown variables.

Thanks

> I'm trying to do a little custom work on the look of the popup notification for new emails. All design stuff, no real programming changes. However, I am trying to have the popup fade in while the rest of the page fades to a black screen at about 75% opacity. I normally know hoe to do this, but I'm wondering where I need to put the black background div.

Well, when you want to change the rest of the page then you have do modify your main site template. I am not quite sure (have not tried it yet) but maybe you can modify the BODY tag (add an ID) and use it to set the opacity (if not use the DIV tags to encapsulate the whole body).

> I am also looking to change the User Menu link to the inbox to reflect the number of unread messages (E.X. "Inbox (34)" or, if there are no new messages just "Inbox". Suggestions? I have a general idea, but again I don't like poking into other's code if I didn't have a hand in writing it, too many unknown variables.

It would be quite easy to to that. You can check mod_uddeim_mailbox which also shows these numbers but I do not recommend to do that modification (nor I recommend to use that module) on bigger sites. Using this module (or when you modify the menu) means 5 additional SQL queries. When you have lots of members this would slow down your database significantly.

Post edited by: slabbi, at: 2008/03/12 12:07

Thanks, I'll work on that later today. I was also wondering how I would go about actually changing the look of the box itself and which is the better choice: DHTML or Javascript?

DHTML