New way of skinning?

[I am Freddy G]

NOTE: I have never made a complete full custom skin myself. I saw the guide and yeah I just never finished.

There is one thing I have learned to live with and that is the skinning system of IPB. I don't love it and at first hated it. Now I have been using it for almost a year and my opinion is changed. It does have good template logic +1.

One thing that still hasn't changed though is my original thought. Why Can't skins use static files? I can only explain what I mean by how phpBB does it :faceless: - (put your emotion there)

Here is there skin structure

• SKINNAME
  
  • template - all the files for the skin in a .html extension (good for editors)
  • imageset - all the images in the skin *I dont remember the exact name
  • theme - all the css to the style
    
    

That makes perfect sense to me, and I am sure to many more. You have index_body.html where everything starts off - and yes this is a little hard to find. And the first line of code is an include for overall_header.html - as it gets more into the forum system you have it calling all these files with .html extension. They are not true html files or php files. There system uses them as templates for the skin engine.

This is good for me because it is easy to modify. Where as in IPB I can't load the file in an external editor to modify. Sure I can try dev mode but dev mode is scary for me :baby:

So what do you think of this idea? Is it Stupid, Great, Too Advanced, or Too Basic?

[bfarber]

That's how IPB used to be in IPB 1.3. I doubt we'd go backwards to implement such functionality...

[Jaggi]

i think it was said that the dev/skinning process would be looked at in 3.1 and looked towards making it easier. I do find it quite annoying at times too but do work exclusively in_dev mode when making modifications. I guess its just how you want to work and change that to work how ips expects it to work :P.

[EquityHub]

Ya, not a huge fan with having to work with indev mode in order to work with my regular dev tools...

[SCS]

I don't have any complains with the current system. It's very organized and easy to work with. What got on my nerves was the import process for hooks/apps which is buggy in the current version (there has been several threads about this). I wish IN_DEV was considered/supported as a real feature, instead of something that the IPS Staff uses and let us use as well.

If I were to request anything it would be a way to create CSS Hooks. I hate editing tons of CSS files just to change a small thing. These are static files, therefore it would be hard to accomplish such thing, and doing it could bring a load of server issues (creating/replacing files, etc), but one can dream, right? :)

[Sinistra]

The skinning has gotten alot harder in 3.1 with all the CSS files you have to edit just to make a nice looking custom skin. its not like you can just change the "CSS of the main just to alter the look. I have tried to make my own skin and it just takes to long. Im not saying go back to the 1.3 way but any way we can get less CSS files to edit in the new skinning system?

[jgladding_merged]

Skinning is way more difficult in 3.X. It used to be that you could have a template, drop in the "guts" inside and it's almost done.
The biggest issue IMO is the amount of real estate the forums take up. I want to keep everything under 730 pixels so I can leave the right hand side for ads. That's impossible now - or atleast not without seriously getting under the hood and monkeying with the CSS. I can throw in an ad in the header (yippee), but it looks forced. I actually got feedback that I have more ads on the new skin - funny thing is, due to the significant limitations I have 1/3 of the ads as before.