Question

I want to create a custom skin based on the dragon skin. I follow the recomendation in the TWikiSkins topic and base my custom 'ap' skin on the dragon skin by copying view.dragon.tmpl to view.ap.tmpl. Then I open a topic, then I add ?skin=ap to the url address, but the topic doesn't render like the dragon skin. Rather it seems to have no format, and more importantly, the left navigation panel is missing. I really would appreciate a pointer to step by step (or HelloWorld) type example for creating a skin.

Environment

-- RalphEllison - 08 Jan 2007

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

what you're missing, is that view.SKIN.tmpl is not the only file that is used to generate the output.

if the view template is truly the only thing you want to over-ride, then you can just edit as you have, and then set ?skin=ap,dragon

What this does is to look for *.ap.tmpl templates first, and then fall back to *.dragon.tmpl resulting in (at minimum view.ap.tmpl and then twiki.dragon.tmpl )

I'm doing work to simplify this for twiki 4.1, (see http://blog.wikiring.com ), but you should also not that DragonSkin seems not to have been publicly updated since 2004, and so does not quite work right for twiki-4.

-- SvenDowideit - 08 Jan 2007

Regarding what I want to do, my priorities are - hide certain links from the header (Attach) and footer (Kupu, Attach, PDF, Raw Text) both in view and edit. - when a topice contains a form, in view, hide the form, and in edit hide the big empty text area.

As a starting point I want to get on the learning curve by doing a copy paste of some existing skin and then experiment. (Thinks: I would also like to learn how the skin-template-script machinery works, in an orderly fashion, but find the reference topics of limited assistance.)

Any assistance would be appreciated

-- RalphEllison - 08 Jan 2007

Sorry, closing after more than 30 days...

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Mar 2007