Header Art using Style Variations

What a cover is for a skin in TWiki is the variation for the style. A "style variation" is a cascading of an existing style sheet with a small set of classes. a style variation is by no means a full-fledged skin style as it does not try to cover every aspect of the skin. Moreover it just adds, for example, header art and in addition modifies some fore- and background colors to match the graphics. Practically, a variation need not to be applicable to every skin style but is a dedicated variation on one style. But I omitted to enforce this rule by indexing style variations by skin styles, which would suppress those variations that are not designed for a given skin style. So all former header styles have been reworked to proper style variations and been improved.

The problem of positioning and styling the search box has been addressed by adding a little css classes that allow to address the search box in the position it is switched to. For example, the search box is tagged natSearchBoxPos1 if it is rendered in position 1. There are four possible values for the "searchbox" skin state variable:

• top - put the search box in the topbar
• pos1 - in the top of the sidebar
• pos2 - somewhere in the middle of the sidebar depending on where you placed it in your WebSideBar, e.g. just before the MySideBar section or after the BlogAbout section.
• pos3 - at the bottom of the sidebar.

Using searchbox="off" disables the search box completely. And again, things are set using preference variables. Right now we have the search box in the topbar by default and switch it to position 2 in the Blog web where it is placed right under the BlogAbout section. Finally, every style variation and every skin style have been adjusted to display the correct fore- and background colors of the search box depending on where it is positioned.

Now that things are in place, I could wander through the virtual space and collect ideas on header art. There are lots of resources that you can grab and convert them to nice header bars for the NatSkin. In the end things will pile up and thus be packaged as a separate NatSkinArtWorkContrib. The NatSkin itself will come with a reduced set of styles and variations and will not fatten up over time. That's what the artwork package will be for. Expect some recent additions and fluctuation til things mature. And hopefully, some day, there will be others contributing NatSkin artwork.