The UI (User Interface) Service allows your Turbine application to be skinned using simple properties files that are located in the WEBAPP/resources/ui/skins/ directory hierarchy.

The service and its associated pull tool provide the following enhancements over the old UIManager pull tool (which has been deprecated as od Turbine 2.3.3):

• Skin properties are shared between all users with lazy loading.
• Non-default skin files inherit properties from the default skin
• Access to skin properties from screen and action classes is now provided for
• Access is provided to the list of available skins

Skin properties are defined in WEBAPP/resources/ui/skins/, the following might exist in a file WEBAPP/resources/ui/skins/default/skin.props:

and the following might exist in a file WEBAPP/resources/ui/skins/custom_skin_1/skin.props:

Retrieving a value from a skin is as simple as (where user.getSkin() returns the name of the currently selected skin):

or in a template (the current skin is retrieved from user.Temp):

Images, css and javascript files are stored under the skin directory also and can be accessed thus:

You can retrieve an array containing the names of the available skins thus:

or in a template:

You can combine skinning and localization thus:

Please refer to the JavaDocs for the org.apache.turbine.services.ui package for further details.

You can configure the UI Service using the following properties:

Note that the name of the file within the skin directory that actually contains the name/value pairs for the skin is fixed at skin.props.