Not Sure...

[Jaggi]

...if its stupidity on my part or ips. Don't worry this is a suggestion I'm just gonna state the procedure first. Anyways today i was wanting to export some of my custom skin templates into xml and actually found out to do this properly is actually impossible. Few ways i went around it was first to export the skin set which was useless because it was encoded. So i turned on dev mode and tried these new features that were added to apparently help us modders. First i tried the Export Templates Bits feature to see if that worked. Well it gave me a unencoded xml which was a good start however it failed to give me the customizations and only the original edits. Ok so i moved onto Export Master HTML which had the same results as before even after i rebuilt the master html templates from the php files. I messed with every tool i could find and even tried the export module skin files feature which gave me a file with no customization data in it again.

My question is why isn't a pretty simple and straight forward thing made simple. Why is there no feature to simply export your html in a xml file that is unencoded and that features all the customizations that you made. I definitely think this should be added to either the dev mode of the skin templates or as a main feature of the export features of the skins.

[Michael]

Why do you need to export them to an unencoded XML format? Why can't you just use the built-in Export feature to make that encoded XML file? I've never heard of anyone needing to do what you're trying to do before.

[Jaggi]

its to use with your installer mod!

[Michael]

I always build those XMLs manually by just copying and pasting the code from the individual template to my XML file. It does take a while. You said when you runed on IN_DEV that:

...it failed to give me the customizations and only the original edits.

So are these new template bits you have added? And then when you do this export from IN_DEV it is only exporting the original code you first put in for each of those templates?

[bfarber]

This is more of a resource-site thing. I find it extremely simple to export my customizations. There are multiple options

If you are making a new skin file
Simply make the skin as normal in the ACP (specify a new group, i.e. skin_modification), then IN_DEV there is a form on the Skin Manager page at the bottom. Enter "modification" and the skin set id you made the skin in (I always do this in the master template set, as I always work with IN_DEV on, but you can change the ID if you like) and it exports the XML file (unencoded)

If you do it as a PHP file, make it under skin set id 1, then use the tool to import from PHP files, and follow the above steps afterwards.

If you are adding skin template bits
I would always do this under a separate skin set. Then you can export customizations from "" in that set ID following the same steps above as I recall (don't enter a name). I very very rarely add skin templates to existing groups though, as this is just more work to export.

At the end of the day, the tools are there. If you need an overview on best practices, post a topic on IPS Beyond and I can help go through them some.

[Jaggi]

At the moment i have new template bits which i've been trying to export i also have edits i made to existing templates bits although thats not needed for the universal mod i am playing with the idea of adding and allowing users to "overwrite existing templates if they have a skin which is identical to the original ipb skin and not edited any bits". I've been doing it how you said michael but as you said it is long and tedious. I also like to export the templates for reference uses so i can save them before i go breaking stuff (although i do tend to just export the skin or rar the cache dir for this).

P.S. Ok i followed your method bfarber and finally got it to work and its nice how it exports just the customized bits and takes note of existing templates that was edited and exports them too. This will definitely save me alot of time in the future. Would still like to see a method to do this easier and more user friendly or for example a extra option just to export all skin customizations (as you do before) but the option to turn off encoding in it.