Better documentation on the skins would be my vote. :)

Configuration and skins get my votes as there are still many config options in the php files which are not covered anywhere. For example " disable xhtml checking or security checking in posts" Also ease of skinning is what new users want most.

The documentation is horrible on b2 evolution, what it needs is examples of code, and how they are used for newbies (like me) -

ie: what does item->get() do ? all it says is 'get an item parameter without displaying it (advanced function)' - this doesn't help me at all.. if it had examples that would be awesome.

jonnypage, do you mean examples in the context of skins, or just in general?

As for the rest of you, of course you'd pick Skins... the one area of b2evo that I haven't jumped into yet. I'll get started and see what I can do, but any help is appreciated.

@Danielmorrison
If you want to write pieces of the doc, I suggest : do it !
It would be great if someone who just started with the software can write pieces of information for other newbies.

Don't wait until you jump into skins to write things.

Every question you had, there will be somebody else who will have the same question.

Topanga,

Thanks for your confidence. I'll probably be doing a bunch of that.

I do consider myself a more tech-savvy user, so my questions are probably different from others'.

But its 20 degrees (F) above normal in Michigan today, so I'm going outside! :D

Better documentatin for skins I believe.
Time to come up with something nice guys... Time to start documentating everything :D

djamoer wrote:

Better documentatin for skins I believe.
Time to come up with something nice guys... Time to start documentating everything :D

Good idea! When you gonna do it?

Here's an idea I have for documenting what one can do with a skin. My thinking is that by saying "do this to get that" you always have to repeat yourself because people ask the same thing in different ways. For example half the time people want to control the date_if_changed they refer to it as the date of the post. It's not, so, even if they wanted to search the forums or how-tos, how would they know to look for date_if_changed? Therefore I decided there should be an '_everything' skin that has, well, everything in it. The user who wanted to tweak his/her skin could download the _everything skin and take a look at how their blog content looks with all sorts of options displayed at the same time. Then they could open the files and read the comments in the source to see what they need to put into their own skin to be happy.

Anyway the effort is a couple of days old now so it hasn't gotten very far off the ground. [url=http://wonderwinds.com/testingskins/index.php?blog=2&skin=_everything]Check it out here[/url] and let me know what you think. I'm a bit unhappy with the look of it, but I wanted to start with the custom skin and I didn't want to change the css (unless absolutely required). Maybe I should add a class for my notes so they show up in red or something?

Oh here's a little snip of what I'm doing inside _main so the end-user gets a bit more bang out of actually opening the file:

	if( isset($MainList) ) while( $Item = $MainList->get_item() )
	{
		$MainList->date_if_changed();
		// http://doc.b2evolution.net/0.9.0/evocore/ItemList.html#methoddate_if_changed
		echo '<p>customizing the date_if_changed format:</p>';
		$MainList->date_if_changed( '<h4>', '</h4>', 'l F jS, Y' );		
	?>

Already I figure I need much more in the way of comments to help the end user see the light, but it's a start. Feedback will be appreciated.

An "everything skin" is a great idea as a basic skin editing resource. From your current version I'm not sure what the blog author (fancy) version does. Otherwise, it's already very helpful.

I'm not sure if it could be integrated into this skin, but it sure would be nice to have a css tag resource which would tell which classes, etc. to edit for particular page elements. Unfortunately, not all the skins use the same css markup....

Anyway, it sure is nice seeing the documentation ball rolling forward with some momentum.

basic and fancy: do a mouseover. The title tag for fancy includes the author's name instead of saying "by this author". The drawback I'm seeing now that I'm playing with Item->content() is that it makes the page load VERY long. I think longer comments inside the code will help a lot. Also I have to get the top-line-little-print stuff back into it's stock order, then do the tweaks. No need for me to name the things that are stock, so that'll help the look.

CSS is really tough because of like you said: there ain't no standard list of classes and ids and whatnots. The only way that I can see is to take a custom skin and put a little image here and there with a tool tip that identifies what class makes it be that way. Difficult though because sometimes classes don't really show anything. Even so, it won't help someone who starts with a different skin and wants to tweak it.

But :
if we would make sutch a 'everything in it-skin' than we could create classes and put the css along with it.
if users wanted an other layout, they only had to change the css in that class, and not search through all css files (including in the rcs-files)

in short : it would be a whole new way of making skins...
other programs have there 'default' classes...
let make these default classes for b2e..
let show how new skins can be made...

Well, as I think back to most of the css frequent questions, it's usally about styling or placing the date or post items. And how to edit/style sidebar sections, and maybe one or two other things that I can't think of now.

I don't think there's a need to document every class, but maybe some help could be given for common questions....

Still not sure what format that would take, but maybe it's still worth consideration.

Settings & Configuration are quite hard then other one :(

I think documentation on advanced topics would be a nice addition.