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Overview
In this lesson we are going to review how to set a Skin and Layouts for our Project. In the Wayfast world Skins are sets of CSS and images that define the look & feel of our projects. Skins enable a comprehensive and consistent structure for organizing assets while fostering reusability.
On the other hand Layouts are HTML templates that allow us to design our Pages structure. Layouts can contain Javascript code to provide transitions and visual effects unleashing a wide range of extensibility. Layouts contain placeholders.
Placeholders are nothing but names you give to html containers or layout regions. Placeholders let Wayfast know where to place controls so you can have fine-grained control over the User Interface.
We can create new Skins and Layouts or reuse existing one from Wayfast Library. In this lesson we are going to reuse existing one but we will cover how to create a Skin and Layouts from scratch in the section “Skin and Layout Editor”.
How to select Skin on a new Project?
Precondition
Now that we have the main structure created (Solution), user can click on “Project” button and build the first element to initiate an Application.
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A popup is displayed to select the main settings for your new application.
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Click on “Accept” button, the “Select Skin” popup will offer different templates to apply in your application’s interface. Design selected under this step will be the default when the different pages are going to be created. Also the buttons and popups are going to be defined by this Skin selected.
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Click “Assign” button and the skin is saved for this Project.
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Enter to the Project and click on Preconditions
For this exercise we are going to assume we already have a Solution and a Project.
Selecting a Skin
As we’ve seen in the last lesson, after we create a Project, Wayfast immediately prompts the Skin selection screen.
You can always select a different skin if you decide to restyle your app.
Just click on the Project name and then click on the “General Options” icon at the top headermenu,
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Observe that In the “Skin” field is remaining you will see the option we selected when starting the new Project from the scratch. Wayfast allows the possibility to change skin if it’s neededwe created the project.
By clicking on the “Change Skin” button we will be able to select another skin from the library.
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Once we click on the “Submit” button, the skin will be associated to the Project.
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NOTE: We can check how the skin looks like by clicking the preview button on any page in the Project. |
How to select
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Layouts for a Project?
Another feature to build the FrontEnd basic controls at newly Projects are the Layouts. This predefined options that Wayfast provide can be selected by user.
Click Now we are ready to select one or multiple layouts from Wayfast library. A Layout must be associated to the project before creating the first page. Otherwise, Wayfast wouldn’t know where to place controls within pages. So let’s get to it.
First click on “General Options” and then click “Layout” on the “Lay-out” tab.
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It’s important that the Layouts are selected before Team initiate the development. Otherwise, the Pages that you create can’t have any default layout options to start.
Click “Associate Layout” button
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Now Click on the “Add Layout” button.
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A popup will be displayed with all the available Layouts given by Wayfast.
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Select the ones that are going to be used in the Application and click “Accept”
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To confirm that the Layouts are saved, click . We can select all the layouts we want. For this sample we are going to choose “Popup” and “Simple-base” and click on the “Submit” button.
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Now we are ready to create pages using the selected layouts.
Just click on “Project pages” icon at the top header. Then click menu and then click on “New Page” button and you will find the Layouts displayed in the dropdown and available for Application.
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The “New Page” form will be displayed and the selected Layouts will be available in the Layout field.
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Recap
In the first partsection, we learnt about what are Skins and Layouts, how to select the Skin that will be our Application’s User Interface and how they can be changed from General Options. In the second part, we selected the default Layouts for the Application that Wayfast provide under General Options-Layout and finally we went through the Page’s creation steps to verify that these Layouts were correctly associated and ready to be selected in the application developmentSkins and Layouts from Wayfast library and how to select a Layout in a page. In the next section we will dig deeper into how Layouts define Look & Feels design when creating a page.