[Pmwiki-users] Re: PmWiki.LayoutBasics

[chr@home.se]

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:

> In writing the documentation, the one page that probably needs a lot of
> work is the one that describes the basics of creating/customizing skins
> (http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/LayoutBasics).  If there are any people
> out there who could identify ways in which this could be made clearer
> I would really appreciate it.

The site is down for maintenance, so I couldn't look at LayoutBasics, 
but here are some thoughts:

> The basics:
>  - The skin to be used is controlled by the $Skin variable, which names
>    a directory in pub/skins.
>  - Inside of that directory there should be a '.tmpl' file.  If there is
>    only one .tmpl file, it is used, otherwise PmWiki uses the .tmpl file
>    with the same name as the skin, the file 'skin.tmpl', or else it throws
>    an error.

* What is a skin...?
  Q: What is a skin?
  A: A ''skin'' is a local customization the wiki that changes the \
     appearance and/or behaviour of the wiki. This could simply be a \
     matter of choosing different colours, or more advanced such as \
     changing the structure of a wiki page.

     On a more practical level, a skin is a '.tmpl'-file which uses \
     a special format to describe the layout of a wiki page.
Is the text above correct?

* Why not call a skin-file for '.skin'??? Shouldn't we call them templates
  otherwise, or am I missing something?

> The somewhat more than basics:
>  - The variable $SkinDirUrl is set to the url of the skin's directory, thus
>    graphic images and CSS files can be referred to as $SkinDirUrl/something.css.
>  - If there's a file called '$Skin.php' or 'skin.php' in the skin directory,
>    it's loaded before any template files are loaded.  The .php file can also
>    request a specific template file to be loaded by calling LoadPageTemplate().

I guess this actually a relativel advanced thing to do, so I recommend 
putting some exampls on the page. Ideally these examples could be tested a 
a wikiadmin, i.e. the examples are shipped with pmwiki (e.g. in 
pub/skins/examples/example1)

I hope some of this helps:-)

/Christain

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr