hufflepuff_x3 Skin for b2evolution v0.9.1

Skin Author: Tara C. (d kitty)

Skin Author's Web Site: http://www.dementedkitty.com

Skin Name: hufflepuff_x3

Designed for: b2evolution v0.9.1

Derived from: Various (see below)

Installation: Decompress (unzip) the hufflepuff_x3.zip file, transfer the resulting hufflepuff_x3 folder to the skins folder of your b2evolution installation, and assure that read/ write/ excecute permissions are set correctly for php and image files as per the host server settings

Notes:

The Hogwarts house crest skins are simple, sweet, made specifically for b2evolution, and just in time for the next Harry Potter movie, The Goblet of Fire. The plaid background images and Hogwarts house crests are courtesy of Muggle Tiff's beautiful wallpapers found on MuggleNet. Please don't hex me Muggle Tiff, I'm a fan of your work!

Link colors on each skin are coordinated to match the backgrounds and yet still be legible (a difficult task with the blinding Hufflepuff variant). Each skin includes RSS subscription buttons to Bloglines, MyMSN, MyYahoo, and Newsgator out of the box. Neither of these four skins contains a calendar or links to the b2evolution back office. I hate the calendar and don't like the idea of putting links to my admin area on the front page of my site.

All four skins have three-column layouts that feature uniform column length. That means that all three columns should always be the same length as the longest column. This is mostly courtesy of A List Apart's Faux Columns technique, my examination of Francois Planque's custom skin, my own experiments with a similar layout at the soon to be unveiled Well Fed Network, and some css sleuthing by Danny Fergueson. The four skins have been tested in Mozilla Firefox, Camino, Mac MSIE5, Opera, Konqueror, Mac Safari, MSIE6 for Windows XP, and lo, they were good. XHTML and CSS are valid per the code validators at W3C.

A print style sheet is included with each skin that has been tested with all the browsers mentioned above. Only the contents of the center column will print, including trackback and comment information. Thanks to Ed B for introducing me to the simplicity of print.css a year or so ago.

These four skins don't spell out the URLs of comment authors. They display the text "Link" next to the name left by a comment author that is an a href link to the web address left by the comment author in the comment form. That's all done via the $Comment->author_url($linktext=link) function placed in _feedback.php. Doing so keeps things tidy by assuring that comment author URL text doesn't overflow into the third column.

Each of the four skins displays the name of a blog post's author as a link at the top of each post. The name matches the chosen "Identity Shown" in the blog author's user settings. The a href matches the URL in the same blog author's user settings. This is a handy feature for blogs with multiple authors.

Please alter the code of this skin as you see fit so long as the results are used only on personal web sites. This skin may not be used on corporate web sites! I'd give broader permissions but the artwork belongs to a (rather talented) third party. I wish to keep her interests in mind.

- Tara (d kitty)