Tips, hacks and skins for B2evo

I converted the popular skin Purple Beauty to B2evolution >= v2.4.1. This skin has always been a popular choice back in the 1.10 days. EdB coded the skin for 1.9. Original design is by Dieter Schneider. The skin is listed in the skins repositories where is gets a 2.9 / 5 vote.
When EdB coded the skin he left a few points to be improved. At that time I spent a lot of time on this skin and managed to solve most issues. That's documented in this forumpost. Of course all improvements are implemented in this version.

Skinshot -this is from the 1.10 version, but it hasn't changed that much-:

Download: Skins for b2evolution 2.x - Purple Beauty.

Have fun

I completed the skins. They are called Wastepaper Male, Wastepaper Female and Wastepaper Kidcorner. All are available in the extend section of B2o. I liked working on these skins. I used a technique that I thought of myself: make the headers 'on the fly' in gif or jpg with any font. This way I have ultimate flexibility in font choice. I knew the technique is available in php and luckily I found a working example, so I didn't need to do the programming myself.
One of the themes I thought out was a note. I envisaged a handwritten font with it. As a theme it worked with the idea of a blog: there thoughts, that would have been thrown away if the weren't written down. This is to be a confrontation between temporarily (note, wastepaper) and eternity (blog). That has becomne the wastepaper collection.
Next are three ideas or themes. In no particualar order I want to work on these.
First 'newspaper'. Making the main area a little yellow / grey with newspaper font (Harald Tribune and Dutch Volkskrant) in the header and a bold font for article header. This is to be wrapped in torn paper or the zigzag cut of a newspaper on the sides.
Second 'Gealic'. There are some nice fonts and artwork (knots) available for a nice look. As for colours, green will be prominent, but I'm not sure of secundairy colours.
Third 'Twenties'. Once again there are fonts and artwork on the web for inspiration. I could mix three artperiods: Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts and Art Deco or stick with one of these. Flowers, beatiful long ladies and bright coulours mixed with soft tones.
I have a fourth idea that hasn't been worked out yet. I need some more inspiration for that one.
All three of them will use the latest in technology: special layouts for handhelds and printing, choosable font sizes, round corners ('Twenties') and more. So keep a watch on this blog for progression.

This will be my playground for the new skin. The main blog still uses the default skin (beautiful in it's simplicity) but I want to move forward. It chose the "Basin" skin as a start beacause of the idea I had: Why not genererate a GIF or PNG image on the fly to replace the head title. EdB used a simular technique in his Gotcha plugin. In this way it's possible to include any TTF font. Of course, I'm not the first when it comes to brilliant ideas. All good things have been done before. I'll be using the Dynamic Heading Generator by Stewart Rosenberger http://www.stewartspeak.com/headings/ that I found in the "Basin" skin. Author of this skin is Danny Ferguson.
I'll be working with the techniques by Danny Feruson on the original "custom" skin by FPlanque.

Feel free to comment on this work in progess.

Don't forget what I wrote earlier, but I changed my mind a little. i found a neat site that gave me inspiration for a new project. I'd better write: there are two sites that come up with ideas. Anyway, it's going to be a single column layout. Working title is 'minimal'. Any suggestions for a production title?
The base colour at the moment is green, but I'm not sure of it. Green tends to be nearly visible at places.
The right column is going to move, probably to a custom made exta blog, like the Linkblog (Navblog or so). What's left is the blognavigation and the articles. I want the article info (author, date, not the title) on the left of the main article. After the article come the links, again in a full body list.
Furtermore I want to experiment with a few features I described in a previous post, notably user controlled changing of font size.