How To... Document a Project - Skins

Forrest uses skins to make your documentation look the way you want it. It is not the job of this tutorial to teach you how to make a skin, we will just look at how you can change the one used when building your application.

Which skin is used is controlled by ./properties.xml file. In this file you will find a forrest element. Within this element is a skin element. To change the skin in use simply change the value of the name attribute of the skin element.

Available skins in the forrest cent are:

• basic
• jakarta-site
• avalon-site
• scarab-site
• xml-apache-site
• forrest-site (Work In Progress)

You can also add your own skins by putting them in ./src/documentation/override/skins. Try changing the value of this attribute and rebuild the documentation with ./build.sh/docs and point your browser at ./build/docs/index.html to see the change.

If you want to play with your own skins then copy the ./src/documentation/override/skins/krysalis-site directory into you application and replac the forrest elemnt in properties.xml with the source below.

            <forrest loglevel="WARN">
              <!-- builtin available skins:

                   basic
                   jakarta-site
                   avalon-site
                   scarab-site
                   xml-apache-site
                   forrest-site  (Work In Progress)

                   You can also use your own skin by putting it in src/documentation/override/skins.
                   It will be see by Forrest as any other skin.
               -->
               <skin
                name="krysalis-site">
                  <navlinks>
                     <link1
                      href="http://www.krysalis.org/">krysalis</link1>

                     <link2
                      href="http://www.krysalis.org/centipede/">centipede</link2>

                     <link3
                      href="http://www.krysalis.org/centipede/manual">manual</link3>
                  </navlinks>

                  <logo>
                     <group
                      src="http://www.krysalis.org/centipede/images/group-logo.gif"
                      href="http://www.krysalis.org" />

                     <project
                      src="http://www.krysalis.org/centipede/images/project-logo.gif"
                      href="http://www.krysalis.org/centipede/" />
                  </logo>
               </skin>
            </forrest>

Rebuild the documentation (./build.sh site) and take a look at what you've done.

You may have noticed there ar many more folders in ./build/docs/, these were generated by various antlibs in the build process. In the next few sections we will take a look at these