A Closer Look at the Blueprint .6 plugins
November 9th, 2007On top of yesterdays release of the silksprite plugin. There are already 3 plugins included in the default blueprint download that are quite useful. This will be a closer look at using these plugins and will hopefully inspire you to create & deploy plugins in your future projects.
Buttons

buttons styles <button /> & <a/> elements of type button. Into a more polished, cross browser web 2.0 look. It also handles hover states.
Of note, the button plugin provides 2 “modifier” classes of type positive & negative which provide the green & red appearance. Although the icons shown in the sample are included with the button plugin, they aren’t handled by CSS.
Fancy-Type
Fancy Type provides significant, baseline compatible classes to improve the polish of your blueprint layouts. The provided classes include
- p + p indentation instead of line shifts for sibling paragraphs
- .alt a fancy, italic script to call attention to ampersands, prepositions etc.
- .dquo Fancy quotation marks for the start of titles & lines
- .incr Reduced font & line size for sidebars & similar that complies with baseline
- .caps Special, small-caps class.
CSS-Classes
A collection of utility classes to help with formatting.
- .hide
- .left (float left)
- .right (float right)
- .reset-margin
- .reset-padding
- .reset (reset both padding & margin)
- .align-left
- .align-right
- .align-center
- .align-justify
All of these plugins can be included in your project simply by adding the line
@import ‘plugins/(plugin file)/(plugin css file)’;
to screen.css



