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 providing 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 “How to create Skins and Layouts”.
How to select Skin on new Project?
Precondition
Now that we have the main structure created (Solution), we can click on “Project” button and build the first element to initiate an Application.
A popup is displayed to select the main settings for your new application.
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.
Click on “Submit” button and the skin is saved for this Project.
Enter to the Project and click on “General Options” icon at the top menu
Observe that the “Skin” field is remaining the option selected when starting the new Project from the scratch. Wayfast allows the possibility to change skin if it’s needed.
How to change the skin in existing projects?
In previous lessons, we explained how we can select an skin under the “New Project” creation. At “Modify Project” page, Wayfast allows us to edit this selection.
Click on “Change Skin” button
A popup displays different templates to apply in application’s interface. The layout we select in this step will be used by default on the pages we create in the future. Also the buttons and popups are going to be defined by this skin selected.
Scroll down and select the new skin. Confirm by clicking on “Assign” button.
NOTE: We can check the new skin by making a preview on any page from the Project.
How to select Layout on new Project?
Another feature to build the Front-End basic controls at newly Projects are the Layouts. We can select this predefined options that Wayfast provide at any time.
Click on “General Options” and then click on “Layout” tab
It’s important that the Layouts are selected before the team initiate the development. Otherwise, the Pages that you create can’t have any default layout options to start.
Click on “Add Layout” button
A popup is displayed with all the available Layouts given by Wayfast. Select the ones that are going to be used in the Application and click on “Accept” button
To confirm that the Layouts are saved, click on “Project pages” icon at the top menu. Then click on “New Page” button and you will find the Layouts displayed in the dropdown and available for Application.
Recap
In the first part, we learnt about 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 development.