TWiki skin demo using Css Zen Garden

13 Nov 2006 – 11:31 in WikiRing tagged css, design, skin, twiki, zengarden by Sven Dowideit

In this post, I show an example of how easy it can be to create a unique design for TWiki.

There are at least 2 ways to skin a TWiki.

One is to torture a poor designer, by forcing them to work out how twiki does its stuff, by making them create css for one of twiki's skins.

The other is to treat the creative guys as a rare resource, let them make you a design (and css if they can) and to roll a skin to suit. Or better yet, have a twiki skin that conforms to their view of the world – css Zen Garden created by Dave Shea being an interesting touch-stone.

This is probably the third skin that i've done this way, and every time I do it, I get annoyed by the mush in the default skins. The way the twiki skin masters seem to redefine everything, rather than there being a common basis that they and other skinners then customise. (see for eg, the structure of the rdiff picker user interface)

I suspect the biggest reason that there are no building blocks for skinners is that there are 3 mashed up paradigms used in the definition of templates… inheritance (OO), mix-in (Aspect oriented) and straight declarative. This makes it hard to consistently work to one style, while trying to force those stupid browsers to co-operate.

I should only need to define a twiki.zengarden.tmpl, eveything else should be able to be re-used from the default base temples. This is the ideal that I will work towards as I finish this skin, and as we work towards TWiki 4.1 and beyond.

I have installed the work in progress CssZenGardenContrib at my personal blog site (note the Next design links to browse):