Wow that is one great looking skin 8| I love it, too bad your not releasing it publicly :(

Welcome to the forums btw.

The blog is running v0.9.1, and my help only reaches to v1.6+ builds.

But have you looked at the tutorial [url=http://b2evolution.net/man/2005/06/18/make_a_skin_based_on_my_proper_layout]here?[/url]

Yeh, good luck. I really really love that skin :D

Thanks for the kind words. I'd be happy to post the design for more folks to use, but the birthday present idea sort of warrants a unique look I think. I could foresee releasing a generalized one for other folks. It could be though though, because the logo would have to change substantially to allow for varied lengths for blog titles in regular web fonts, and the blog listing would have to change to allow for a random amount of categories.

I'm checking out the tutorial now. Thanks for the link.

Is it difficult or risky to upgrade to 1.6? If that would add features and make this process easier from a help standpoint, I'm ok with that. I can't imagine my friend would object to an upgrade. I don't want to undertake something that would take me away from my design project though, nor would I want to put her site at risk in so doing.

You are best to stick with the build you are running now or the latest v0.9.x build. As you can find lots of tutorials and nearly every user on this forum uses those builds.

It's only that my help only reaches out to 1.6+ builds.

But yeh i think that tutorial is very good, and should help you out.

You can grab a copy of .9.1 and install it wherever you like to tinker with. No need to worry about your friend's specific database, unless you suspect there are unique hacks in there. It looks like a pretty normal install so I think you'd be fine making an installation then tweaking away.

Squidmaster wrote:

I have noticed some tags in her skin stylesheet that I haven't seen on her actual page, so I can't style those accurately.

No biggie if you do your own installation right? Lotsa different pages and not all are quickly found. Plus it's possible there is stuff in the style sheets that isn't used anymore. For example anything to do with showing stats in public. With your own installation you can see what works and what doesn't, and eventually stumble across ... er ... 'discover' a generated page that doesn't exactly blend in with the overall skin.

Yeah. Just make a skin. Minor tweaks to an existing skin give you minor changes. Start with the 'custom' skin and make it be what you want. As a general rule once you get the main page to look the way you want you'll find that 90% of the pages match 90% of the look.

Then give it to her. If/when she stumbles across something that doesn't look right and points it out to you just let her know you figured she'd have another birthday someday ;)

Yeah, I was considering installing myself.

Is there a way I can get all of her archives and "restore" them to my installation so that I have all the posts, blogs and categories to play with? This design is specific to her categories and blogs, so that would be really useful.

Am I best served by working with her version and not worrying about upgrading to the latest?

Thanks again all.

Upgrading to 0.9.2 or 1.6 would be fine, though I'd be inclined to be happy with 0.9.2 if I was in your shoes only because there's a lot more info in these forums about 0.9.* tricks and tweaks than for 1.6. How much access to her web do you have? If you have admin permissions on her blog then you could just create the same blogs and categories on your blog. If you really want the full deal you'll need to have a backup of her database. IF you can get that, then do an installation of 0.9.1 on your server followed by uploading her backup to your server. BAM - instant copy. Once there you upgrade to whatever version you're into using. Now you have her database with files from *whatever* version so you start modifying the skin.

You'll find lots of stuff about skin work in these forums. Basically you'll look at skins/yoursking/_main.php for the content that'll get displayed, and skins/yourskin/yourskinname.css for the style stuff. After that you start looking at links on the blog and check out the ones that include "disp=foo" in the url. Like =profile or =archives. That'll show you how the other files in your skins/yourskin folder are building pages. BTW that'll be where you'll need to change little things like if you change "h2 class=blah" to "h2 class=bleh" in your _main you'll probably need to do the same change in a handful of other files in the skins/yourskin folder.

Haven't done this bit in a while, so here's a simple primer.

_main.php makes all your pages by doing some php function work and calling your style sheet. SOME pages get built by calling a file in the skins/yourskin folder. Those files typically offer cosmetic tweaks to how the page will look, then call the same file name from the skins folder. These 'second files' actually do the work of creating the page. This way you can tweak the look of pages by working in your skins/yourskin folder and leave the guts of actually building the page to everything else.

That's a pretty basic summary. Hopefully it'll get you down the skin creation path a bit...

Well, I have ftp and SSH access. I have an account on her blog as well but with limited functions. I could probably ask her to increase them if it would help. I don't know why exactly, but when I copied her blog to my hard drive, the skins/custom folder was inaccessible. Obviously I was able to copy the version from the "skins" page here on the b2evolution pages, but I found it odd that I couldn't copy off the original.

Is copying a database as simple as copying the correct folders? I have no database experience.

I appreciate your advice. The overview already helps a fair amount I must say. I just finished recoding and notating my static html sample page. Next I'll tweak my style into it, then hopefully have some meat to work with when tinkering with php stuff. Some of it is obvious, but some is not. There seem to be some functions called that I cannot find, but I haven't tried particularly hard on that yet.

The database is not part of files and folders, and - AFAIK - is not something you can access with FTP. I know nothing about SSH. Perhaps someone hip to that will come along and say if it can help you or not? The only way I get at my databases is by using phpmyadmin from my cpanel.

Most servers are equipped with a cpanel, and in that their will be a database management program, usually phpmyadmin. (atm you don't have access to the cpanel or phpmyadmin).

I would recomend just installing the same version that your friend uses on your machine (install apache or IIS then php and mysql). If that sounds to hard just use your server if you have one.

Then if you would like a copy of your friends database to work with either get the mysql connect information and authorise the ip address of the machine where your b2evolution is installed via cpanel.
OR as EdB said (which is the better option), get a backup of her database via phpmyadmin, then use your install of phpmyadmin to restore the saved backup.

The backups are just zip files or something.

Oh and for finding functions in php, php.net has a brilliant documentation and if you use firefox you can get a search extension for it, so whenever you want to see if u can do something just search php.net and i'm sure you will find it.

Hope this hasn't complicated things....

Ok, I have posted what I hope is a final version of my design (see addresses at top if you like - feel free to weigh in on your "blockquote" choice.) Now I'm going to have to modify the php (with my 0 skills), but before I do, I want to ask a few questions. I'm sure I'll have more as I progress, but this will make a start of it anyway.

Does it hurt anything to remove the "post details" section that shows up above the date on individual archive pages? Does this serve any purpose aside from display?

Can I put html code within "echo T_('')" function areas?

What do the .debug and .error classes do? Do I need to style them (i.e. do they ever show up publically?)

Thanks all.