With the Subtext 1.9 release just around the corner, this is probably a good time to highlight some minor, but important, changes to skinning in Subtext.
We made some breaking changes to Skins.config file format to make the naming more consistent with the purpose. There was a lot of confusion before. The following is a snippet from a pre-Subtext 1.9 Skins.config file.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SkinTemplates xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<Skins>
<SkinTemplate SkinID="RedBook"
Skin="RedBook"
SecondaryCss="Red.css">
<Scripts>
<Script Src="~/Admin/Resources/Scripts/niceForms.js" />
</Scripts>
<Styles>
<Style href="niceforms-default.css" />
<Style href="print.css" media="print" />
</Styles>
</SkinTemplate>
</Skins>
</SkinTemplates>
And here is how that snippet will change in Subtext 1.9.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SkinTemplates xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<Skins>
<SkinTemplate Name="RedBook"
TemplateFolder="RedBook"
StyleSheet="Red.css">
<Scripts>
<Script Src="~/Admin/Resources/Scripts/niceForms.js" />
</Scripts>
<Styles>
<Style href="niceforms-default.css" />
<Style href="print.css" media="print" />
</Styles>
</SkinTemplate>
</Skins>
</SkinTemplates>
The key differences are in the SkinTemplate element. The following attributes have been renamed:
SkinID was changed to Name
Skin was changed to TemplateFolder
SecondaryCss was changed to StyleSheet
Another new change is that the Style element now supports a new attribute named conditional. If specified, Subtext will wrap the stylesheet declaration with an IE specific conditional comment. This is commonly used for stylesheets that contain IE specific CSS hacks. For example...
<Style href="IEHacks.css" conditional="if ie" />
Gets rendered as...
<!--[if ie]>
<Style href="IEHacks.css" conditional="if IE" />
<![endif]-->
Thus only IE will see that style declaration.
tags: Subtext, Skinning, Skins, Blogs