Skinning Tutorial

In this tutorial we'll create a very simple calendar skin from a scratch. The skin will not use any images so it should be quite easy to modify. You should have some basic understanding of xml files to be able to follow the tutorial.

Before you start to create skins you should make sure that you have a text editor which supports utf-8 encoding. Do not edit the files with Notepad! Get a proper editor like PSPad instead. In Linux gedit or kate should be fine.

To start we should create a folder for our new skin. So, go to Rainlendar's skins subfolder in the application folder and create a new folder. We'll call it Nahka (that's "skin" in Finnish :-). This will also be the name of our skin.

Inside the Nahka folder create a new text file. The name of the file must be skin.xml. Rainlendar is able to use the xml-skins also in uncompressed form which makes things easier during the skin development phase as we can just refresh the calendar to see the changes.

Now, open the skin.xml with a text editor.

The xml file needs a specific header so just copy the text below to the editor.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

The main tag in Rainlendar2 skins is <skin> which must contain all the other tags. So, lets add it.

<skin version="1.0">
</skin>

Note the version="1.0" in the opening tag. It defines the version of Rainlendar r2skin format. Currently it should always be set to "1.0" but if in the future the skin format changes this value is used to determine the format details. Note that the version="1.0" in the <?xml> tag is completely different so do not change that.

All skins need to have an info section which defines the name of the skin and some other details. Here's an example

<info>
  <version>1.0</version>
  <author>Rainy</author>
  <email>rainy@iki.fi</email>
  <homepage>http://www.rainlendar.net</homepage>
  <comment>The result of the skinning tutorial.</comment>
</info>

The version element contains the version number of your skin. You can increase it when you make changes to the skin so that the people who use your skin know that it has been updated. The email and homepage elements can be left out if you don't want to publish that kind of information. The comment element can contain e.g. instructions how to use the skin or whatever you want to put in there.

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The skin.xml should be like this now (it doesn't work yet so no need to test it):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<skin version="1.0">
  <info>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <author>Rainy</author>
    <email>rainy@iki.fi</email>
    <homepage>http://www.rainlendar.net</homepage>
    <comment>The result of the skinning tutorial.</comment>
  </info>
</skin>