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Rocky coast enviroment

Your best bet for creating a new color scheme is to start off with an old color scheme and change it until it is suits your needs. To do this:
  1. Find the server directory.
  2. Enter the swiki directory.
  3. Enter the default directory.
  4. Enter the files directory. There you will find the color schemes as listed by the AdminTool. Check out http:/files/ for looking at existing color schemes.
  5. Duplicate the color scheme directory you most like and name it for your color scheme. That directory contains all the information that is part of a color scheme.*
To get a good idea of all the files that you will have to change, open the index.html folder in a browser. As you create your new color scheme, you can reload this to see your progress. Here is an explanation of the function of the page and book icons:
  • The plain icons (view.gif, etc.) in the first column are what the links to that function will look like.
  • The bw icons (viewbw.gif, etc.) in the second column are what the icons look like when they are not links, such as when you are searching the site, the edit button does not work. bw stands for black-white as graying out the buttons is a good strategy for making them not look like links.
  • The ie icons (viewie.gif, etc.) in the third column are what the icons look like when they are 'in effect.' So, viewing the top page, will make both the top and the view button be in effect. These are not linked since you are already at that operation.
  • The help icons (viewhelp.gif, etc.) in the last column are what the icons look like in the help file.
  • The color schemes with javascript roll-overs have an additional column of icons (the act icons, such as viewact.gif). These are used for the roll-over, when the icon is active.
In addition to these book and page icons, there are two others. The EmotIcons show up occasionally such as when a search does or does not return a result. The File Icons show up on the uploads.
All of these icons can be in one of these three formats: GIF, JPEG, or PNG. They just have to be consistent for this to work. So, you can make all the page and book icons be PNGs and all the File Icons be JPEGs and all the EmotIcons be GIFs, but you cannot have the view icon be a PNG while the edit icon is a JPEG. The server when starting up will decide from the file names which ones you are using. The only thing is that you will have to change the extensions in the index.html file for that page to show the icons.

The text files in the color scheme directory

In addition to the icons, there are several text files associated with a color scheme. Most of these are .sm files, where sm stands for "Swiki Mark-up." These get evaluated at runtime as book templates. Basically, they are HTML with a couple of special tags that get evaluated. The most important of these for most purposes is that <?toFiles?> gets transformed to the URL to the directory of your color scheme. Here is a description of the function of each:

tags.xmlcontains the alternate tags for the icons in XML format. You should be able to edit this by hand fairly easily.
endHead.smis inserted at the end of the header. You can use these to add javascript functions, style-sheets, etc.
colorScheme.smis inserted into the body tag. Usually, this is used to change the color of text and links
beforeButtons.smis inserted at the beginning of the body section, before the buttons
divider.smis inserted between the page and book buttons
afterButtons.smis inserted after the book buttons
endHead.smis inserted at the end of the body section
bar.smis inserted whenever horizontal lines are added to the Swiki

*Note: Whenever changes are made to a color scheme, the server will need to be restarted so that these changes will take effect. Not restarting the server will lead to strange results.