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Applying and Manipulating Umbraco Skins
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APPLYING AND MANIPULATING UMBRACO SKINS
Umbraco skins are created by the Umbraco community members and can be installed from the
Developer Packages section of the Umbraco back offi ce. Basically, Umbraco skins enable you to
change the look and feel of an Umbraco starter kit simply by applying the skin to a starter kit site. In
addition, you can customize skins with user-defi ned text, colors, and images. Umbraco skins build
on the best practices approach of Umbraco starter kits by demonstrating the best way to implement
styling and layout control in your site.
When you apply a skin to an Umbraco starter kit site, the skin’s styles are used in place of the
existing starter kit site’s styles. The skin simply provides a unique Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) fi le,
including any images required to achieve the layout defi ned by the CSS. A skin can also add or
change small portions of the starter kit site’s HTML templates if needed. You can roll back all CSS,
images, and HTML changes to the starter kit’s default skin for a site because Umbraco creates a
backup of the starter kit’s default skin when you apply a different skin.
By default, you can only apply skins to the Umbraco starter kits as opposed to an arbitrary Umbraco
site as skins depend on the starter kit’s layout. Umbraco automatically determines which skins you
can apply to the currently installed starter kit and presents these in the skin selector.
You can select and apply a skin (see Figure 1-24) either when you install an Umbraco starter kit or
you can do so at a later time.
FIGURE 1-24
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