Getting started with web skinning in Farcry

by Gavin Stewart

Introduction

Web skinning is the art of implementing styles and layouts to templates within a farcry project. These templates are found under the webskin directory of the farcry project architecture. Note that we are talking about the "project" architecture not the "core" architecture. The rule of developing a successful farcry website is not to modify the farcry_core code but only the farcry project code. Think of the core as an engine in the car, which makes the car function, and the project is the body of the car where you can modify the look and feel. You can also extend the functionality of farcry core but this is all done within the project architecture.

There are several different scenarios for a skinning whether it be implementing a new look and feel to an existing farcry website or creating a new farcry website from scratch or even just making some changes to part of a farcry website. All scenarios should follow a similar pattern to implementation.

We will look at just modifying the look and feel of a farcry website and not extending the core functionality as this is outside the scope of this manual. At Daemon we have just undergone a redesign of our website and it was my job to do the re-skinning so I will use the Daemon website as an example. I will take you step by step though the process I used for implementing the new skins, and show you the different stages I go through. We will look at re-skinning the homepage and then I will take you through skinning some teaser pages to reflect the new design and show some different techniques to overcome difficulties implementing lists.

Depending on your circumstances you will receive a bunch of html pages from your designer with pure HTML mark-up and some JavaScript and css style sheets or you may have done the designs your self. Whatever the case I will show you how to get these into the farcy project. There are some key issues that you or your designer should take into consideration when designing for a farcry project. There is a section on design considerations. I recommend that you should read this before going ahead and starting the mark-up templates.

Skinning can be a very easy process however there could be some difficult situations where you have to put your thinking cap on and figure out how you would implement the mark-up so a prerequisite to skinning is that you must have an understanding of the coldfusion programming language. If you follow these guidelines it will open up a whole world of knowledge and prepare you to tackle the most complex websites.