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Steven HarmanSteven Harman is a passionate developer who believes that writing great software isn't just a job, its a craft.

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Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext

Day Dreamin' I am proud to announce the release of Day Dreamin', a new skin for Subtext.

Okay, so it's not exactly the most exhilarating news of the day, but I think it's a pretty sweet little skin. Plus, I'm hoping to stir up some interest in the Subtext Skins Gallery. Phil announced the gallery almost six months ago yet at the time of this writing there are only five user submitted skins (including the new Day Dreamin' skin).

I know that there are a lot of people using custom skins in their Subtext installation, but I'm not sure how many of them are aware of the SubtextSkins.com site. So perhaps this post will help... who knows.

About Day Dreamin'

Enough about the Skin Showcase... how about some details about my new skin, yes?

My quest to build this skin started when a Subtext user (The Shiva) posted a message to the Subtext Forums about a great resource for XHTML/CSS based web design - Open Source Web Design. I thought the sight was interesting and made a mental note. Then towards the end of last week I got to thinking about the lack of "designy" (yes, that is a technical term) skins that are available for Subtext.

I enlisted the help of my girlfriend and within 20 minutes we had a hand full of candidates that I would use as the inspiration/starting point. In the end I decided to go with the Dreamy template, courtesy of Ginger Ninja.

Some Details

As I said, I used the Dreamy template as a starting point for building this new skin, but I did modify some elements and added a good bit to it as well. Since the original layout was built with pure XHTML/CSS it was pretty easy to massage the Subtext skin controls into a form that worked with the basic CSS used by the template.

I also added the following "not so standard" Subtext controls and/or features to the skin:

  • List of Categories per Entry Control
  • Recent Comments Control
  • Subtext Search Control
  • XFN Microformat Highlighter
  • Lightbox JS for images
  • Live Comment Preview
  • Nifty Corners Cube
  • An "Assets" directory that includes the original .psd (Photoshop) images used to generate the header and footer images.

I'm not claiming this is the greatest skin out there - hell it's only the 2nd skin I've ever built - but I hope that someone will find it useful... or at least think it looks somewhat designy. :)

Get You Some!

Now don't everyone rush out and download it at once, there's plenty for everyone and you can get yours here. Enjoy!

What others are saying.

# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Simone Chiaretta
Feb 23, 2007
That's awesome!!!!
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Steve Harman
Feb 23, 2007
Thanks Simo! Like I said, I'm hoping this increase the visibility of the Skins Gallery and get more of the community involved in submitting their custom skins.

Only time will tell.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Dave Donaldson
Feb 25, 2007
Did my ScarletAndGrey skin ever get into the release of Subtext?
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Steve Harman
Feb 25, 2007
@Dave: I added it to the 1.9 branch and it should be in the 1.9.4 release.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Dave Donaldson
Feb 25, 2007
Sweet. I'm running 1.9.0 and have been meaning to upgrade.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar ron
Mar 06, 2007
thanks for this skin. i'm currently using it on my site.

i did notice that the search box seems out of place and there is no formatting on the search results. i haven't had time to dig into the code, but did i miss a file when putting it on my server?

i also wasn't sure if the comment preview part wasn't working because of something in subtext, or from the skin.

sorry for asking troubleshooting questions here.. one of these evenings i will look through the code myself.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Steve Harman
Mar 06, 2007
@Ron: Glad you're digging the skin.

I took a look at your site and it seems that you may be missing a few CSS files. There are four CSS files included with the Day Dreamin' skin - style.css, search.css, IEPatches.css, and niftyCorners.css.

There are also several JavaScript files included (all located in the "scripts" folder). I suspect that you probably don't have your Skins.config (or Skins.User.config) file setup correctly for this skin.

I included a sample Skins.User.config file with the skin download. You'll want to make sure that you have the skin setup just like the sample so all of the necessary JavaScript and CSS files are included in the skin and sent to the browser.

Let me know if you have more questions.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Steve Harman
Mar 06, 2007
It looks like Phil made some changes to the IIS compression settings on our company web server (we host SubtextProject and SubtextSkins as a contribution to the project) to improve our bandwidth usage.

As a side-effect, all of the skins downloads to get shortened by a few KB. Which means the downloads are corrupt and not able to be opened.

We are working to correct the issue and I'll post a follow-up here when the issue is resolved.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Steve Harman
Mar 07, 2007
The download site is now working again.

Apparently Phil turned on HTTP Compression for the web server and it hosed the download sites because DotNetNuke pulls in all requests (for static files as well as dynamic ones) and then tries to serve them up. So he ended up having to disable compression for those sites... which sucks for bandwidth, but at least they are working again.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar matt
Mar 29, 2007
nice skin.

do you have any decent references to learn how to skin subtext? I did a quick search on google, but didnt find anything spectacular (especially for first timers).

cheers.
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Steve Harman
Mar 29, 2007
@matt: Thanks! I like the skin too and I'm interested to see how many other are actually using it.

As for skinning Subtext - right now I don't believe we have any solid documentation put together (there is some stuff on the Wiki - but it seems to be down right now). The best advice I can give (aside from keeping an eye on the wiki) is to start with the Naked as a base and then customize it.

The Naked skin is a bare-bones Subtext skin with all of the necessary markup and CSS selectors, but no actual styling is applied. So typically you would do the following:
  1. copy the Naked skin to a new folder.
  2. add config setting for you new skin to the skins.User.Config file (so your new skin can be selected via the Admin UI.
  3. start adding style information to the style.css file.


Well, those are the basic steps anyhow. Feel free to post another message here (or in the Forums) if you have other specific questions.

Good luck!
# Day Dreaming - application error
Gravatar Monika
Sep 04, 2007
Hi Steve,

I have just installed Subtext, and wanted to find a much suitable skin for girls too :) I tried to install you Day Dareamin, but after setting in the Configure page, and try to load the blog with new skin, the following page appears with Application Error title:

Could not load file or assembly 'MagicAjax' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Can you please help, what I did wrong? I copied the Skintemplate from the skin.user.config into my Admin directory.

Thanks
# re: Day Dreamin' - a New Skin for Subtext
Gravatar Steven Harman
Sep 04, 2007
@Monika: Something to keep in mind - The Day Dreamin' skin was originally built for Subtext v1.9.4 and has since been upgraded to work with the most recent versions Subtext. Meaning, you need to make sure that you're using a version of the skin that is compatible with the version of Subtext you are running.

If you're running the most recent Subtext bits (v1.9.4) then you should be able to grab the latest version of the skin from the SubtextSkins site. If you're running Subtext 1.9.4 or earlier, then you'll need an older version of the skin - as mentioned in my previous post and on the SubtextSkins site.

Good luck, and let me know if you have more questions.
# ooops, i did it again..
Gravatar Monika
Sep 04, 2007
Sorry, mea culpa, you have right, I used the wrong version, typical dummy fault.
thanks, it looks great, very cherry colors :)
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