Maurice Lanselle wrote:
I am learning to use Forrest v0.6. I am very confused by the
information on changing skins and skin properties, and I think there may
be issues.
Yes, this is true, we welcome patches for improvements once you
understand things. Right now I'll try and help you get through the
inadequate docs.
I would like to simply:
1) Try the available skins, to see how they look and how they vary so I
can choose my favorite.
edit the forrest.properties file to set project.skin to the name of the
skin you want to use.
or
forrest site -Dproject.skin=SKINNAME
(as is correctly suggested later in this thread by Tim Williams)
2) Customize the colors of the chosen skin.
This is not as simple or successful as I expected. There seems to be
inconsistent information on what skins are currently useable, and also
the inclusion of their color tags in skinconf.xml.
a) The "available-skins" command gives out-of-date information : "crust,
pelt, tigris"
We only actively support pelt. All other skins are either in development
or deprecated, although some are still usable (you can find out what
they are by looking in the skins directory of the distribution).
You comment above indicates that the list provided by availabl-skins is
out of date, please raise an issue for us so we can remember to fix it
for the upcoming 0.7 release.
b) When I asked for "crust" (no longer exists), the handler chooses a
deprecated skin : "krysalis-site" , which in turn provokes a warning and
a recommendation to use "pelt".
It should default to pelt, please add an issue about this too.
c) skinconf.xml has color tags for "krysalis", "Forrest", "Collabnet",
"Lenya using pelt", but these are all either deprecated or not mentioned
in the available and defaults lists. So how would I change the colors
for, say, tigris (which does work for me)? How could I (easily) obtain
the color tags to use the correct names and know the initial settings?
The sections in skinconf do not relate to a specific skin. They are used
to create the CSS. The included sections are provided as examples.
If you want to experiment with the colours for tigris (for example)
simple look at the class names you want to affect and add an appropriate
entry to skinconf.
Also confusing for me, at [http://forrest.apache.org/0.7/docs.html] in
the body it lists
0.6 - the current release
0.7 - the current development version
but in the menu under "Other>Overview" it lists
- 0.8-dev
- 0.7 (current)
- 0.6
Oooopa, this is a result of us being in the middle of preparing for the
0.7 release (which is currently development).
Thanks for taking the time to highlight confusions with our docs. One of
the hardest things for us to do is write docs that are useful to the
newcomer. We have all been using Forrest for quite some time and don't
often have to think about these issues. Your feedback is important.
It would be really useful, both to the devs and to subsequent newbies if
you could provide a patch or suggested improvement to the docs as an
issue once you fully grasp what we try to explain here. We'll happilly
apply your improvements.
Ross
