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Screen Elements of a TWiki Skin

This topic is intended as a guide for TWikiSkins designers. It depicts screen elements of the default skin of TWiki, the TopMenuSkin. New skins can use some or all of these elements.

Screen Elements (click to enlarge):

• Top menu:
  • 1. Home link & pulldown; pulldown contains list of webs
  • 2. Web link & pulldown; pulldown contains main actions on web
  • 3. Breadcrumb, with "P" indicating parent(s) of current topic. Example:
    Home > Sandbox web > P > P > View
  • 4. Account pulldown with link to profile page and personal bookmarks
• Page header:
  • 5. Site logo, linked to site home
  • 6. Jump box
  • 7. Search box
  • 8. Page action buttons: Edit, Attach
  • 9. Broadcast message (if enabled)
  • 10. Tag links (optional, if TagMePlugin installed)
• Wiki page content:
  • 11. H1 heading
  • 12. Table of Content (using %TOC%)
  • 13. H2 to H6 headings
  • 14. Paragraph text
  • 15. Unordered and ordered bullet lists
  • 16. Table, with header and rows with alternating background colors
  • (not shown) Blockquotes
  • (not shown) Code text, verbatim text
  • (not shown) Images
  • (not shown) TWiki form table (database record)
  • (not shown) File attachment table (if any)
• Page footer:
  • 17. Page links: Edit, Attach, Print version, History links, Backlinks, Raw View, Raw Edit, More topic actions
  • 18. Page version info (revision, date, author)
  • 19. Copyright statement and small TWiki logo

These are the screen elements based on the default TopMenuSkin layout. A custom skin may have a completely different layout, but could have most of the elements listed here.

-- Contributors: PeterThoeny - 2012-08-18

Comments & Questions about this Supplemental Document Topic

Yeah! I always get confused doing a new skin. By the way has there ever been timing done on the skin template engine? I have wondered if "pre-compiling" the skin template would improve rendering performance. Meaning, collapsing all variables that can be pre-rendered.

-- CraigMeyer - 2012-08-19

I have not done formal timing, however, there is a small difference between the default skin (2.5 sec) and ?skin=plain (2.4 sec) that has no page decoration, just page content.

-- PeterThoeny - 2012-08-20