thegreenman wrote:

how about a default skin with a back-office style chooser.

It would be pretty simple in implementation, and I think would give b2evo another one-up on the competition.

This goes with all the advanced customisation : tags instead of code for editing templates, css advanced editor. These 2 steps are not simple at all. If you compare blogware solutions you'll see that there are only one or two that have this kind of features.
best solution is perhaps like for wysiwyg2xhml editors to find external scripts that are stable and good quality and make plug-in with them.

but what if it were only to change the default skin, and not anything structural, just what can be changed in the custom.css file?
i.e. just the colors and styles of the text and background.

how difficult would it be if it only worked on the one file?

Maybe as a non-coder I don't see the difficulty, please explain...

thegreenman wrote:

Maybe as a non-coder I don't see the difficulty, please explain...

As you I'm not in dev team and have hundreds of feature request ;)

I've coded a few years ago and know that this feature isn't as easy as it seems. If the editor is not enough powerfull this won't let users do everything they want and if it's too powerfull (ie choosing colors via colorname, rgb codes ...) this would be a lot of coding works and errors management.
This is a major feature that should be developped once everything under developpement is stable and powerfull enough. If you look at version under dev you'll see lots of new features, lot of code refactoring/cleaning. Dev can't just realease too much new features at the same time, first because they don't have 48h/day ;) and also because a new feature means bugs and evolutions in UI/code.

There's an article on OSC about [url=http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=426]dream CMS[/url] if you compare the description with b2evo you'll see the most important thing is to have a rock solid and powerfull core, that's what dev team is working on. User management, acl, page generation and plug-in system. Everything else just plugs-in into core ;)

thegreenman wrote:

but what if it were only to change the default skin, and not anything structural, just what can be changed in the custom.css file?
i.e. just the colors and styles of the text and background.

how difficult would it be if it only worked on the one file?

Maybe as a non-coder I don't see the difficulty, please explain...

I thought about coding something like this myself. I was going to make a template with its own admin page. Very hackish, nothing polished or worthy of integration into b2evo. There's one major complication. You have multiple blogs that can potentially be using the same skin. So if one user changes a setting, then everyone's blog changes. If this isn't a problem for you, then you're right, it's easy to code for a single template with a layout that never changes. b2evo has a "templates" tab in the Backoffice (I'll let the b2evo team wrestle with the wisdom of using Microsoft trademarks in the application) that doesn't seem to fit in with the direction of the rest of the project. I agree that your idea would fit well in that tab, or else that tab should be dropped entirely.