Here are just a few things that are important to understand about the skinning and customizing of Active Social 1.3 and future versions. We will be updating the skinning guide, but I want to share a few important items ahead of time.
1. You will not see any templates in the _default or active theme. We have built these themes off of the new default template set. If you are upgrading, you may want to reset your themes by clicking the button next to themes selection in the control panel.
2. Do not copy the system templates to create your theme. Obviously you can, but we want to discourage the old idea of just copying one of the themes and creating a new one. That isn't necessary. You only need to copy what you want to change.
3. Modify as much as possible by CSS. You can add custom CSS properties to your portal css, custom containers or skins. You do not have to touch any of the default CSS. The default css mainly provides structure and very little design elements.
4. At the time of this post, all small icons (16px) are contained in 1 png file. Creating your own will be very simple and explained in the template guide.
5. As of Active Social 1.3, we will only be maintaining the default set of templates. Any future changes will be documented, but you will be responsible for your own customizations. You are welcome to discuss customizations and receive peer-to-peer support in this forum.
6. We will provide a code gallery for others to post and share css and html snippets.
7.
We will support themes(not skins) that have issues with the 1.3 upgrade. I would encourage you to post the issues in this forum so that others may benefit as well. You must use an XHTML skin for best results with Active Social. We will not be able to support skin issues that affect the appearance of Active Social when using a non-XHTML skin.
8. It is extremely easy to modify the colors within Active Social to match your skin. We are working to have themes for most of the major skins, but in the meantime we will make sure the skinning guide provides step-by-step instructions.