Skins

Skins, or themes, give eMuseum its look, feel, and structure. You can adjust most aspects of your site's appearance by editing its default skin files or by adding and activating a new skin. A skin consists of file types common to the web, such as CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, image (graphics) files, and eMuseum-specific template files ('.tml').

eMuseum 6 uses modern web standards with a clean separation between content and design, allowing anyone familiar with CSS styles to make basic changes to your site's appearance. eMuseum template files are HTML-compatible and also include processing logic. This logic is unobtrusive to web browsers, which will render the content as HTML.

Adding and activating a skin is straightforward. Your installation package contains 3 skins by default:

• Internal - the default design that can be modified through configuration options but should not have its files altered.

• default_neue - a copy of the internal skin which can be altered or copied. This is good for small design changes using eMuseum's default design as the basis.

• skeleton_neue - A stripped-down/minimalist skin with all features but little design opinion. This is a good starting point for completely new designs.

To create your own skin, you can do so by:

• Navigating to \skins

• Copy the "defaultSkin" to start with a base exactly like the active internal skin, or copy the "skeleton" skin to start with a base that has all functionality but is stripped down with very little default styling to allow for a complete re-skinning.

• Rename the skin you just copied

• Refresh the skins configuration page and select the new skin from the "Available Skins" select list.

You can create additional skins by copying and renaming the default Skins directory or creating an empty directory with a unique skin name and copying only selective files (e.g.,' Layout.tml' and 'styles.css') into the Skins directory. eMuseum checks the active Skins folder for an override to the default skin running under the web application container:

• If an override is found in the active Skins directory, it will load that template, stylesheet, etc.

• If an override is not found in the active Skins directory, then the default template, stylesheet, etc., is used.

This allows you to easily modify and manage a few select files under your Skins directory while deferring to the default set of templates for most of your needs.

Note: There are no restrictions on how you name a skin. The name will only appear on the Skins Configuration page; it is never displayed to the end-user.