Hi,

I am working on a new skin for PokerDIY (see test.pokerDIY.com – not finished) and I am hitting the problem where the Admin skin loads a different skin to the normal skin. This means that when a normal user (ie. Not admin) edits any content (and this is all over the place on PokerDIY) – then it goes into Admin mode and does not load any of my content in the panes from the normal skin. I know this has been the architecture for many years, although I still don’t understand or see the point of it. Content should be abstracted from a skin and this limitation means that it is not possible to keep them separate.

The problem I have is that I added a few menus via Panes/Modules with the “Add to All pages” option as opposed to putting them directly into the skin. This allowed me to abstract it from the Skin so I could change it as I pleased with editing the skin, and I assumed that caching would be handled better if it was a module. So my questions are:

1. If I put large chunks of HTML directly into the skin – is it cached as well as if I put it into a module? It’s going to be loaded on every page/request and this worries me a little.
2. Is the architecture ever going to change? I would much prefer to have control what is loaded into the panes when it goes into this “Edit Content/Admin mode”.
3. Is there a way to add modules to the panes while you are in EditContent mode (possibly hacking the DB?)

You can see what I mean on test.pokerDIY.com (skin developed by Salaro) – the top icons, top right X and the bottom links were all HTML modules that I have since had to move directly into the skin as they dissappeared whenever a user added a group/game/league etc. It created a terrible user-experience as half the skin changed.

Disclaimer – I have not kept up with Skinning changes and do not know much about this area ;)

Do you have your site / host skin defaults set and if so is it the same as the rest of the site. That can help a bit, cause it should default with the menus etc that you have marked for every page. Granted it doesn't always work but its just something to check.

You are correct that putting the html in the skin can create a larger load but its not bad cause your really not putting much to begin with, and as stated it can save a trip to the server which is "slower" then loading a modest amount of text. Now if you get all crazy with tables then well we might need to talk, but just putting a few chuncks of html in is typically no biggie nowadays. No worse then adding an image that is fairly large.

I agree, that it would be best to have setting options for Admin skintainer per page as well, and also skin/container settings for printing, unfortunately these are only plans atm.