Appearance Manager -- Choosing, Previewing, and Applying Skins

These options are set from the Skins tab of the Appearance Manager interface. These functions allow you to work with skins that are already installed on your server, including those skins that came with Discus and those you might have installed yourself from other sources.

General Notes about Skins

Skins give board administrators power over the appearance of their discussion boards. By obtaining and installing a skin, the look of a discussion board can be radically transformed in just a few seconds, with all of your existing messages and topics preserved. Skins give an opportunity even to those who are not well-versed in HTML to change the look of a Discus board to their liking.

Skins also offer tremendous power to those who wish to customize the appearance of a board. It is possible to develop a skin from scratch, or to use as a starting point a skin whose appearance is close to the desired result. Using skins, it is possible to achieve nearly any appearance for a Discus board.

With such power also comes responsibility -- skins provide "enough rope to hang yourself with." Since Discus uses message pages as the primary source of message and subtopic data, if you apply a skin that does not properly store this information, the potential exists to permanently lose all of the content of your discussion board. Therefore, we offer the following suggestions:

• Use skins only from trusted sources: Just as you should not open e-mail attachments from people you don't know, you should not install skins on your server from a source you do not know. Either intentionally or inadvertantly, such skins may result in unrecoverable data loss. The only skins reviewed by DiscusWare are those available from our on-line skin gallery.

• Make a backup of your board before changing the skin: If you install a skin and it causes data loss, you can restore from your backup to get back to the place where you were prior to applying the faulty skin. Use the Backup Manager within the Discus Pro administration program, or make the backup manually by telnet or FTP with the freeware version.

• Experiment with skins on a "test" board: A second Discus board that you use for testing is a good idea, and it's even permitted under the Discus Pro license agreement (so long as you are the only person to access the board). If something goes wrong on your test board, your "real" board is still functional.

• Understand the support policy: No support whatsoever will be provided for data loss due to the installation of a corrupt skin. Although we will feel bad if something bad happens, we will not be able to provide any support (in the case of data loss, if there is no backup, there is absolutely nothing we could do anyway).

Skin Selection

This interface lists all skins that you have installed on your discussion board. Four skins come by default with every Discus installation. Additional skins may have been obtained from the DiscusWare Skin Gallery or from other sources. Or, you may have copied an existing skin to a new filename in order to customize it. Regardless of how the skin got to your discussion board, you will see a grid with a radio button to select the skin of choice, and for each skin, the filename, full name, and description.

To preview or select a skin, check the radio button next to the skin you wish to preview or save. Then, click either the "Preview Skin" button to preview the skin in a new window, or the "Save and Apply" button to save your choice of skin and bring up additional options.

Previewing a skin

Previewing a skin will pop up a new window. The initial screen in the new window will be your topics page, viewed according to the skin that is selected. The color and font schemes suggested as defaults by the skin will be used. When previewing the skin, you should expect the skin to appear properly in nearly every regard (since you are the board administrator, when previewing a skin, all topics will be shown regardless of reading privileges).

Click on any of the links to your topics to bring up another screen on your discussion board. In most cases, clicking to a topic will bring up a page containing subtopics. Here the list of subtopics will appear as generated from the skin, and you can expect that things will work properly. On pages with messages, the messages will also be generated from the skin.

The skin preview mechanism attempts to disable much of the following functionality while you are previewing a skin:

• Links to utilities and documentation (search, profile, etc.)
• Create New Conversation button
• Posting new messages

When you are done previewing a skin, simply close the pop-up window in which the preview was displayed.

Applying a skin

To apply a skin, select the skin you wish to apply by checking the radio button in the skin selection table and then clicking the "Save and Apply" button. This will bring up a confirmation screen.

Most skins will recommend a color scheme, which includes settings for the background, text, and link colors; the font face and size; and any alternating colors, generally with descriptions of which aspects of the skin these control. Generally, it is a good idea to accept the recommendations of the skin, as various skins make use of the colors in different ways. The "Apply these colors when saving this skin" button allows you to select whether or not you wish to accept the skin's recommendations.

Some skins will recommend that you set global options when you save the skin. This will add or modify entries in your options.txt file, which controls the operation of your board. Some of these choices may be changable later by using the Options Manager. It is important to note that the "Explanation" of what an option does is supplied by the skin itself, so a dishonest skin writer could trick you into setting an option that you do not want. DiscusWare recommends that you trust options only from those skins you obtain from the DiscusWare Skin Gallery. To disable any option from being set, uncheck the box under "OK" next to the option.

The final section on the page contains the summary of the skin you have chosen to apply, including the file name, the name of the skin, the author of the skin, the copyright information, and the description. All of this information comes directly from the skin file itself -- it is again important to note that it is very easy for someone to write into a skin that DiscusWare wrote or endorses the skin when this is not the case. Since the skin you install is not verified by the program, you must exercise due diligence when installing skins, especially when they are obtained from third parties.

To finalize your application of the skin, click the "Save Skin" button. When you have done this, your selection is saved, and any color schemes or options selected on the previous screen are implemented. To apply the appearance of the skin to all pages on your board, in the regeneration box that pops up, click the "Regenerate Board" button.