DirectAdmin Skins 101

DirectAdmin Support

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Joined
Feb 27, 2003
Messages
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Hello,

After getting many question on how to do skins, I decided to whip up a more "user friendly" document on how to create skins. This is a basic introduction on skins and the old skins document is required for the gritty details on how to package them and things like that.

It can be accessed here:

http://www.directadmin.com/skins_basics.html

John
 
John,

That is just TOO cool! Even I somewhat understand it and I don't speak "Code-Eese"!!

Once again, you guys have distinguished yourselves WAY above the crowd. It's things like this that make people trust you guys and DA and switch from what I've started calling the "Big Three". You are willing to go the extra mile to give us the end users what we want and need and make sure we understand how it works!

I'm wondering if the "Big Three" will wake up, smell the coffee and try to take some of the approaches you guys are taking... It's just about the only thing that is going to save their profit marjins.

Keep up the great work!
 
Once my LoopX skin is complete, I will be writing a guide similar to this, that will assist people in making skins.

There is one improvement that needs to be made to DA's templating feature:

In my work thus far, it has become fairly important that the |DOMAIN| variable becomes case-insensitive. The reason for this, is because when editing the default skin, references to the domain name are sent via GET as "DOMAIN" and "domain". It is nearly impossible to track down all instances/variations of this variable within the skin, unless I do some massive search and replaces.

Other suggestions for skinning:

- Allow skin designers to set the precision of tokens that return floats. For example:

|USERBANDWIDTH| returns 3.1234

Setting decimal precision would allow us to do something like this:

|USERBANDWIDTH(2)| returns 3.12

or

|USERBANDWIDTH(1)| returns 3.1

- Rather than returning just megabytes for disk space/bandwidth, allow the skin designers to select how they want these values returned (as megabytes, gigabytes, kilobytes..etc...). I am aware that you've already made this change as per my request the other day, but rather than calling static tokens, allow us to dynamically select the return type.

:)
 
Hello all,

Glad to hear you like the new skins doc.

Loopforever: version 1.06 will have the follow adjustments with regards to tokens:

domain and DOMAIN will both work as long as one of them exists
all bandwidth tokens will be duplicated and 'GIG' will be added to the end, so that you can get the bandwidth in gigabytes instead of just bytes.
ie.
USERBANDWIDTHMAX = 5832.1
USERBANDWIDTHMAXGIG = 5.69

DirectAdmin 1.06 should be out in a day or two and will also have:

option to allow or disable reseller overselling.
option not to suspend reseller when bandwidth limit is exceeded.

John
 
Windows and .tar.gz Question

Is there a way or tool that can be used with Windows to make a .tar.gz file? So that when the Direct Admin default skin is downloaded and edited on a Windows box, and then recompressed using Winzip, and then uploaded with the skin upload tool and not get errors?

What I tried to do is rezip the skin using winzip and then add the .tar.gz extention which didn't work.

I had no problem doing it manually but it would be faster and easier if I knew how to make that .tar.gz file on Windows.

Thanks for your time and help -Jason
 
Check out:

http://www.gzip.org/#exe

For the Windows binary. I've not tested it and confirmed it's functionality, but I figured it's worth a shot pointing it out to you.

I have already suggested to Mark and John that the skin upload accepts Window's .zip files. It's a low priority feature, but I'm fairly certain John will get around to adding it eventually.

No worries!
 
Re: Windows and .tar.gz Question

jdlitson said:
::zzapp::I had no problem doing it manually but.....::zzapp::
This suggest you know the place where I can find the skinfiles?
It would be nice to work with them like with Invision's skintools in the Admin CP of the forum.

Thanks in advance,
Kids-db.
 
I see.
Right above the directory where your public html files go and create a directory called skins/yourskinname

Hope that helps.
 
jdlitson said:
I see.
Right above the directory where your public html files go and create a directory called skins/yourskinname

Hope that helps.
Yeb, Thats a big help, deserving a big thank you :).

Kids-db
 
i thought the skins went in
/usr/local/directadmin/data/skins/

ie:
Code:
# pwd
/usr/local/directadmin/data/skins/default

# ls
admin                files_user.conf  images           reseller       user
confirmation.html    footer.html      javascript.html  skin.tar.gz
files_admin.conf     header2.html     loggedout.html   style.css
files_reseller.conf  header.html      passwd.html      template.html

everything is in there... and the poweruser skin and any others uploaded are there too for me
 
I suppose they can go there as well but the path I specified works as well.
 
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