PlayerPal Skin Anatomy 101

The Basics Facts

A PlayerPal skin:

• Controls the look and layout of the PlayerPal.
• Is contained within a single folder on your hard disk.  E.g. C:\Program Files\PlayerPal\PlayerPal 4.2\WebSite\Skins\PDAClassic
• Shows up in PlayerPal under the name of the folder E.g. PDAClassic
• Is made up of text files and images (CSS files, ASCX files etc)
• Contains a mix of HTML, CSS and ASP.NET code.

The Basic Concepts

Views & Panels = Page Layout

A PlayerPal skin is made up of Views and Panels.  These are conceptual terms.  A View appears to you as a page in the skin that you see in your web browser.  You can see the view you are looking at in the PlayerPal page URL.  For example http://localhost:9999/default.aspx?view=DefaultView.  In this case DefaultView is a file called DefaultView.ascx in the skin folder.

A Panel is a chunk of common code that appears in one or more Views.  The contents of a panel are same as that of a View.  They are just thought of differently as they are included in multiple Views.  A good example is the common header and footer that appears on every page in the PDAClassic skin.

Widgets = Functional features

PlayerPal has a number of widgets that you can include in your Views and Panels.  These widgets provide the functionality that PlayerPal provides.  For example there is PlayButton widget that you can include to provide the Play and Pause functionality in your skin.

Views + Panels + Widgets = Skin Pages!

Put all these together, add some magic CSS fairy dust and you have a beautiful skin page.

Why not try and build one now?