<p>Basics of Skinning</p>

February 22, 2010

Skinning Basics

Skinning phpVMS consists of two elements - the layout, and then the templates.

Layout

The layout is your "container" - the HTML tags, which sit above and below your content. There are two types of layouts, and they both are placed in your skin's folder:

core/lib/skins/[sKIN_NAME]

This path is important for two reasons:

Your layout files are there
The templates you modify will be placed there

Templates

The default templates are located in:

/core/templates

This folder contains all of the default templates which are used in the site. To customize these, you have to copy the template file you're changing into the folder of the skin you're using.

For instance, if your skin is /lib/skins/myskin, to customize the templates/profile_main.tpl file, copy it into /lib/skins/myskin. This is done for two reasons:

Portability - you can package skins with customized templates, and change them as you want. It's also easy to distribute
Updates - In updates, the core/templates are sometimes updated. These updates are listed in the changelog, so you can implement the changes, and it will not break immediately on updates.