Andreas Schaefer wrote:

Hi

Beside the technical issues which are resolved now the other main reason why I did not adapt XWiki so far is the available Skins. So far I am running the Wiki based on Mac OS X Server 10.5 Wiki which looks very slick. You can see under:

http://blogs.madplanet.com/groups/mpc-staff/

or something hat looks like my blog:

http://blogs.madplanet.com/users/schaefa/

XWiki only provides 2 skins which I don't think are very appealing for readers even though Toucan gets the job done for a writer. So I tried to figure out how to change a skin but could not find a lot of help on how to wrap my head around probably because I am a developer and look to far and think to complicated.

So first I am wondering why aren't there any other skins available? Application like Drupal, Joopla and other have many available.

Mostly because we lack the manpower for developing skins. Yet, there are lots of custom skins in the wide wide web, as you can see on the References page on xwiki.org, but all these skins are not official. I wonder how many would be interested in providing the skin for downloading on code.xwiki.org... So, although there are no other official skins, people do create new skins for their website identity.

In case I want to change the images (let's say making it look like the ones I mentioned above) do I then need to copy a skin directory and start to change the images? And if yes which skin should I use? I seem that 'toucan' has less items and is more up to date but I that is just a hunch.

Toucan builds on top of Albatross. Moreover, it combines most of the individual CSS files from Albatross into one large file, to reduce the number of HTTP requests. To write a new skin, you can either adapt an existing skin, or start from scratch. Depending on how many changes you plan to make, you can either start from the Toucan skin (for few changes) or the Albatross. Basically, what you must do is create a new folder for your skin (like /skins/myskin/) where you copy the style.css from one of the two existing skins, and change it to include a new css file (myskin.css). Here you will write new rules, overriding the ones from the base skin, with a little help from Firebug. For images, you should just put your new images in yout skin folder, and reference them using $xwiki.getSkinFile, since it correctly retrieves the file from the right folder. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/