HobbesSkin is the working title for an update of the original TWiki:Codev.TigerSkin. Once I get the last details sorted out, it will be published back to TWiki as a release version. Until then, you can find the latest beta version on TWiki:Plugins/HobbesSkin.

The skin is in production use on my own website at http://g-b.dk, so I guess you can say it works. Full documentation is included, see the TWiki.HobbesSkin topic in the ZIP file. If you have any comments, please add them to TWiki:Plugins/HobbesSkinDev.

Please see TWiki:Plugins/HobbesSkin for details about this skin.

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Release date?

The final release of this skin has been a long time coming, and I've had other commitments as well. I will get around to finalizing the skin eventually – remember, I'm using it on this website, so I too have an interest in finishing it! But I can't currently say when that will happen. Stay tuned.

Installation

Download the ZIP file from TWiki:Plugins/HobbesSkin and follow the installation instructions on that page. Make sure you also follow the additional installation steps!

Known problems

See TWiki:Plugins/HobbesSkinDev.

Feedback

Please put your feedback on TWiki:Plugins/HobbesSkinDev.

File listing

See HobbesSkinFileListing.

Why is this skin based on TigerSkin?

The name HobbesSkin hints at the funniest tiger I know, from Bill Watterson's cartoon Calvin&Hobbes, but the release version will be titled TigerSkin version 2. When we started out to establish a TWiki-driven intranet, we desperately needed a more user-friendly appearance than the default skin has. At the time, the TigerSkin best suited our needs. We wanted to have something that was useful for a small number of departments yet neither all mixed together nor all separate. Initially, we found that a web per department, plus the Main web for common issues, was a good solution, and the TigerSkin provided the ease of navigation between them and the user-friendliness that we needed. Major winning points were the customizable WebMenu and the friendly toolbar at the top of the page - with the edit link at the top of the page rather than at the bottom.

If I had to use or create a new skin today, I might start out with a different skin than TigerSkin, but in any case I'd need to shop around and compare all the good skins that are already out there. Each of them exists for a reason, and that reason is that other existing skins didn't meet some requirements, so somebody set to work to create a skin that did. This is how all new skins are born. This is also how the HobbesSkin was born.

Why did we modify it then?

While the TigerSkin was the one that got closest to our needs, it still had a few things missing. We sorely missed the per-web background colors, so we modified the skin to include those colors again. The top banner and the general color theme also needed to be modified to be in line with our corporate branding.

After these changes, we had a good setup that we have been using for about a year. During that year, additional requirements and improvement suggestions came up, and further modifications of the skin were called for. At that time it so happened that I set up a Windows server at home (for my own private use) and I tried to install TWiki on that. Once successful, I put the modified skin on it and started to improve it further based on the findings of the company in the last year. It worked as a testing ground so we didn't have to use our live intranet as a test site for the modifications - which was good because I found several errors in my modifications that I was able to fix.

I made some more changes to the TigerSkin and realized that by then, it wasn't a tiger skin anymore but an evolved version, so I decided to rename the whole thing. I'm currently working on finalizing the evolved version so that it can go live on our intranet, and then I'll publish a renamed, evolved HobbesSkin for others to use.

So what's changed then? There are too many changes to keep track of. This used to be described in HobbesSkinChanges? , but that page is no longer updated.