I just finished pushing an updated version of my blog's skin (I call it CityNight) out to my production server - so here it is for all to see! Pretty flippin' sweet, yeah?
Normally I wouldn't throw together such a long string of random thoughts and attempt to pass it off as a blog post for something so mundane as updating my skin... but, I'm bored. Well that and I added a couple of new controls that other Subtext Skinners may find useful.
Additions and Tweaks
Added - SubtextSearch Control
Probably the most obvious and exciting addition is the Search box (and button) in the lower right-hand corner of my blog's header. Do you see it... huh, do you?
I don't recall how long ago the ability to search Entries was added to the Subtext code base, but it's been a while. So why did I just now add it to my blog? The answer is - I am lazy. One cool thing that I added to my implementation that I've not seen on other Subtext skins that have Search is a little AJAX magic. MagicAjax to be exact. So when you click the Search button we kick off an AJAX request, rather than a full post back. I think it makes the User Experience a little cleaner.
I wasn't able to get the Search Results panel to close via an AJAX (or even JavaScript) request because I didn't want to change the underlying SubtextSearch.cs class... I wanted to keep my change in the skin files (.ascx, .css, .js) only. However I plan to look into making the SubtextSearch control fully AJAXified (has anyone coined that term yet?) for the 2.0 release - and I'll likely use ASP.NET AJAX to get the job done.
New - SyndicationLinks Control
If you take a look at this skin, in the right-hand column you'll see a section called "feeds" that has two really pretty images. Those images are links to my RSS and ATOM feeds, respectively. Before I added the new SyndicationLinks control I had to hard-code those links into my PageTemplate file so I could include the "/blog/" directory (which is specific to my blog's URL) in the feed URL. That's all well and good as long as no one else wants to use the CityNight skin.
However, I wanted to try to generalize the links so that anyone could use the skin and those links would Just Work™. Basically the new control just inherits from the MyLinks.cs class (which already exists and handles the logic for generating the link URLs for the MyLinks control). Simple as that!
Tweaks
One of the biggest tweaks is actually part of a big clean up effort - I finally separated all of my IE hacks out into their own CSS file(s). In doing so I was sure to make use of Subtext's ability to generate Conditional Comments.
One thing you'll notice (if you're viewing the skin in IE 7) is the blogStats are now in the correct place. They are up there under the Search box, and above the "news" section header. Prior to splitting out the IE hacks, and fixing this IE 7 rendering issue, the blogStats were drifting up into the header image.
What's Your Take?
So now that I've rambled on about all of the pains I've gone through to make the CityNight skin ready for the masses, my question is... do the masses want it? What do you all think of the skin? Is should it be included with Subtext out-of-the-box, or perhaps just upload it to SubtextSkins.com as a 3rd party skin?
If you have any suggestion, criticisms, or praises in regards to the skin... please leave a comment and we'll discuss. :)