I pretty sure that Skin selection, by visitors, was dropped as a feature many versions ago. ie pre the latest 2# series

John wrote:

I pretty sure that Skin selection, by visitors, was dropped as a feature many versions ago. ie pre the latest 2# series

any idea why it has been discarded ? (allowing any defacement ?)

Well, I do know that studies have shown it's a little used feature.
Re why it was dropped... maybe code simplicity, security ???

I'm not sure.

A little bit of everything. Not really used too much although in many "stock" blogs it was there. The biggest amount of users though tended to take it out and customize a single skin, so what's the point in public skin switching? Also adding more and more sort of meant wouldn't it be nice to trim some stuff that doesn't really add value? And I think a little bit of it was something about getting rid of "legacy" b2 code. That was a b2 thing when b2 was alive ... I think. Hey notice how the "originalb2" skin is also gone at the same time?

Maybe some aspects of security, but also probably some aspects of cookie management and how the developers wanted to be able to handle sub-domains and addon domains better, but this last bit is a complete guess on my part.

So anyway yeah it's gone in 2.* and won't probably ever be back.

Oh yeah and plus add in containers and ask yourself if your exact widget selection would be what you want for every skin you might use. So yeah it was time for it to go and seemed like giving it the boot gave room for growth in other directions that needed growthing.

EdB wrote:

A little bit of everything. Not really used too much although in many "stock" blogs it was there. The biggest amount of users though tended to take it out and customize a single skin, so what's the point in public skin switching? Also adding more and more sort of meant wouldn't it be nice to trim some stuff that doesn't really add value? And I think a little bit of it was something about getting rid of "legacy" b2 code. That was a b2 thing when b2 was alive ... I think. Hey notice how the "originalb2" skin is also gone at the same time?

Maybe some aspects of security, but also probably some aspects of cookie management and how the developers wanted to be able to handle sub-domains and addon domains better, but this last bit is a complete guess on my part.

So anyway yeah it's gone in 2.* and won't probably ever be back.

Oh yeah and plus add in containers and ask yourself if your exact widget selection would be what you want for every skin you might use. So yeah it was time for it to go and seemed like giving it the boot gave room for growth in other directions that needed growthing.

i know i am aware it is not useful for regular usage..i already asked if it was available for the exhibition of b2evo (in b2evo-tr part of my blog, or b2evo-tr website).
but it could be useful for regular use also, only if you would change the dominant color of the skin with a few img or bg, main colors and let them choose (myskin, myskin-red, defaultskin-orange) with a single click.(actually afaik; there is a way to do it with css, i mean use style1.css, style2.css with one click, but i dont know how to, if there is, i d like to hear some clues about it sometime too..)
I will just link to [url=http://skins.b2evolution.net/]skins[/url] i suppose ;).. thank you for your respond..

The skins site uses some cool trickery to display the demo blog. Don't know how though. I think you could duplicate it - but it wouldn't be very clean. So like you create a blog for each skin and aggregate posts into it, then select a different skin for it. Obviously you name the blogs after the skins and probably put the "bloglist" in a free html widget with hand-made links so that it could have a title of "see other skins" or something like that. If it was me I would use a completely different installation so that it would be a lot easier to separate my blogs from my demo blogs, but no one really cares about a "samples in English" blog ;)

On the "slight differences like colors" thing: yeah that would be a cool detail to be able to pull off. Kinda like a scaled down skin switcher in that it would be a "style sheet only" switcher. I also know nothing about how to do it though. Google probably does yah?

One thing you could do for a site other than what you're talking about is to tell people to register if they want different colors (and background images), then give them some choices for a new style sheet that either they or you upload to their media/users/username/ folder. This would require enabling "user specific css" by the way. Or hey even easier: let's say you have 5 flavors of your skin. So you create 5 users named after the different flavors and tell people to "login" with "skin_in_blue" using a simple password. You have already enabled user specific css and have already uploaded the blue version to that user's media folder, so they automagically get that skin because they are that user according to the cookie. That way you don't have to worry about them having any permissions or actually figuring out how to upload anything or contacting you to say "I want blue".

Just a thought or two that might stimulate a thought or two...

thank you EdB, all these are cool reasonable suggestions, regarding the last user media folder solution; i dont think it is quite easy nor explainable to 'tell visitors to do anything' (:, might be good for minor communities, company or family blog etc, anywho, what i thought was switch using css1 to css2 with a single click, however everything may not be done as easy as they sound, eh..
i will keep digging though, will sure post back if i could find sth useful, thank you for your interest..

this is almost close to what i was trying to explain .. [url=http://www.dafont.com/color.php]check this out[/url]..

is this doable not technically, practically..
at least would be good for those who uses a dominant rgb color in all areas of the web site instead of imgs..

You may find Foppe Hemminga's hack useful:

http://www.blog.hemminga.net/index.php/conditional-css-through-php?blog=6