On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 12:43 AM, Kevin<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> the learning process moves forward...
Good. It's kind of fun, hey?
> The skin process was actually easier than I made it out as before...
>
> Using your steps, I was able to make from another clean copy of
> Boltwire, a boltwire skin.
>
> So I now have a zip file called boltwire.zip which contains:
>
> Length Date Time Name
> -------- ---- ---- ----
> 626 09-02-09 20:46 boltwire/boltwire.gif
> 855 09-02-09 20:47 boltwire/code.skin.boltwire
> 4307 09-02-09 20:47 boltwire/code.style.boltwire
>
> When I loaded it, everything worked almost as if I had the original
> skin again.
>
> There were a couple differences..
>
> 1) I had modified the top zone to add breadcrumbs across the top
> right. This is still there when I load the original skin. I should
> have made that type of change in the skin itself perhaps.
Correct, you could put them in the skin directly. Use syntax like
==[(breadcrumb)]== to inject markup directly into the skin file.
> 2) Same thing with the size zone. I added a graphic in the zone that
> if I were really using a custom skin, it would be in the skin file
> instead.
>
> Wondering a bit if I can include zone sections in a skin as well that
> would accomplish the same??
Sure you can copy any pages you like--of course your risk alienating
some user if you overwrite their custom side bar. The solution is to
rename the skin side bar to side.boltwire (or whatever your skin is
named). Same with any other zone. Do not put wiki pages in your skin
zip like right or top, or header, but right.boltwire, top.boltwire and
header.boltwire. These will be used before the normal zone page if the
skin is boltwire, but not overwrite what they already have. Plus you
can easily switch between multiple skins in a site without having
problems between them wanting certain features or layout in a specific
zone page. To get a quick list of all skin pages, you can also just do
a search with type=boltwire to get so named pages.
So I would actually encourage you to create your own action lists,
zone pages, etc. You can also do custom action pages, like
action.edit.boltwire that will take precedence over action.edit if the
skin is BoltWire. Or even action.forum.edit.boltwire with will take
precedence in the forum hierarchy when the skin is boltwire. Here's
the full progression
1. action.forum.edit.boltwire
2. action.edit.boltwire
3. action.forum.edit
4. action.edit
There are some cool possibilities for cool skins (like js and all
also)--the samples are the very simplest possible. Hardly take
advantage of what BoltWire can do.
Here's another helpful tip:
Where possible try to use snippets (also called skinvars) in your skin
and css to make them work on any BoltWire configuration. So for
example:
$$page/some.page
$$skin/background.gif
$$img/boltwire.gif
(theres also $$farm and $$pub)
and then there are four places BoltWire looks to fill a general
variable in the following order (looking at the code right now...)
$$author =>
1. {some.page:author}
2. {author}
3. code.snippets.myskin::author or code.snippets.myskin#author
4. code.snippets::author or code.snippets#author
So you could create a code.snippets.boltwire page for all the system
variables in your skin, which would get overwritten by anything in
their normal code.snippets page, and could overwritten by a data var
on a specific page. This could be helpful for things like meta tags or
footer copyright lines. All that. But because you can use whole
anchored sections you could also but a BoltWire search form or login
block or whatever directly into the skin without having to use a
special zone.
> Still need to play a bit more, but I am getting closer.
>
> I was a little confused by the other skins because they all seemed to
> include secondary style css file which I thought were needed. They
> are not. So it is alot simpler than I thought.
I think some of them have an html page you can view--left over from
the orginal source before I hurriedly converted them long ago. No need
for any actual css page or html page in the skin.
> The other confusing part was how the installed skin get copied over to
> the field/pages area... That took a little getting used to as I wanted
> to make changes to the original files in the farm/skins area.
The skin is copied over immediately upon changing the skin setting in
site.config if code.skin.myname does not exist in the wiki. All
in-wiki editing affects the copy not the original. And any changes to
the original is ignored. There have been requests for different ways
of handling this but they all have their pro's and con's. We have kind
of settled on this, but I'm open to other possibilities. We could
possibly make it configurable in some way...
The main reason is upgrades. If you are running multiple sites using a
couple favorite skins, you can freely download updated skins to your
farm and they will not affect existing installations, except perhaps
graphics or js scripts. Files called directly from the skin folder...
So new sites can take advantage of the changes, without disrupting
existing sites. Again pro's and con's to that I suppose. To upgrade
your existing site, you have to delete code.skin.myname from the wiki.
Once gone, BoltWire will immediately reinstall the new skin,
overwriting all existing files in the skin folder immediately. I think
the important thing is to understand how the process works. I've never
felt fully comfortable with this system, but it works... And there are
plenty of other ways to configure things if desired.
Everything is changeable in BoltWire...
> It is easier than that. When ready to create a zip file, you just
> grab the copies from the field/pages area.
>
> Very cool.
Glad you like it. Looking forward to your first contribution.
Cheers,
Dan
P.S. I just pulled this together into a tutorial page at
http://www.boltwire.com/index.php?p=docs.extend.skincreation. Feedback
welcome...
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