Thanks Bill. That's very helpful. I've removed all the extra code I pasted and just stuck a test "div" at the end. This didn't work - get a blank page. But I noticed that the "<?php" at the top was unterminated. I terminated it and /then/ added my div - and this outputs! Daniel's tutorial does not terminate the "<?php" tags - I assume they get automatically terminated by EOF. Maybe they should be terminated explicitly in the tutorial. Now I need to play with the CSS etc. and see what happens. Thanks for your help. -- Alastair Sherringham http://www.sherringham.net

On 2014-03-06, 7:20 AM, Alastair Sherringham wrote: You got the method of extending the template itself correct, you just missed one tiny part. Add $template = 'ZedDocsTemplate' to the line with $skinname and $stylename. This will tell your skin implementation to use the template class you created instead of continuing to inherit the name of the template that SkinVector gives it. ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]

On 2014-03-06, 12:01 PM, Alastair Sherringham wrote: That's probably due to the absolute positioning that Vector's css uses. You'll have to add some extra css of your own to tweak the top position of stuff, or add a relative positioned wrapper around vector's normal content to contain the absolute position within a box you can push down. ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]

On 2014-03-07, 1:13 AM, Alastair Sherringham wrote: Firstly, because I misread the question/technique I'm going to give an answer to a different question, one you didn't ask ;). "What's the advantage of making a subclass of VectorTemplate and just copying all of the execute() method instead of simply copying all of the VectorTemplate and renaming it?" Strictly speaking, since the majority of Vector's html is in the template class' execute method instead of broken up or given some form of insertion points, tweaking that technique to include a template subclass with only a copy of execute in it isn't all that much smaller. The advantage would be that you're still not 100% copying code and if one of the non-overridden methods is changed you don't have to re-copy anything. The disadvantage would be that those few non-overridden methods aren't considered as "public" as the rest of the skin, so there is a slight possibility that someone may make a modification simultaneously to Vector's execute method in core and one of those non-overridden methods that breaks in your clone of Vector because the non-overridden method depends on the changes to execute() that are not in your skin. As long as you're only duplicating the template portion and keeping the rest like my tutorial either way you still have the advantage of not duplicating Vector's pile of css. Of course neither is really ideal since in both cases a the majority of Vector's template is being duplicated. Depending on what you want to add and where you want to add it there is a better trick that can be used. Look around the template for the skin you are extending at it's uses of $this->data['somekey'], $this->html('somekey'), $this->text('somekey'). See if the spot you want to insert your html has one of those and it's the right type (ie: You're not trying to insert raw html in a spot that uses $this->text('somekey'). If you find one instead of copying all of execute you can use a hack where you extend execute(), modify $this->data (which is used by ->html and ->text), then just let the parent skin's normal execute() method run with the modified ->data instead of duplicating it. function execute() { // Modify $this->data['somekey'] parent::execute(); } Then you keep all the advantages. ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]

On 2014-03-07, 1:13 AM, Alastair Sherringham wrote: Now that I think I actually understand what you're asking I'll answer your question. If I understand it right now, Bill is suggesting that you use: <?php // ... class SkinFubar extends SkinVector { // ... } ?> <header> My html header code. </header> ... This idea is over 9000% wrong. You're not actually adding anything to the skin at all. The html is simply being echoed whenever the php file is loaded, which is typically the first time SkinFubar is needed. This happens even if the skin isn't used, just as long as it's autoloaded, and is not present if the skin is used to render multiple pages (like DumpHTML). In one circumstance this can lead to the "headers have already been sent" fatal error as it's possible that the echoed html is output before we define our HTTP headers. Otherwise, ie: if ob_start() happened to be called and collected that text, what happens is this supposed header is really garbage (the technical jargon type) that gets output before any of the skin's html is output. Which really means that your "header" looks about like this: <header> My html header code. </header> ... <!DOCTYPE html> <html ...> ... This html is completely invalid. The entire page <head> is now part of an implicitly inserted empty <body>, any class defined on <html> or <body> probably won't even target the DOM in your header. But worse, the DOCTYPE has been completely killed – as it must be the first part of the page – which will trigger quirks mode on your wiki and – depending on how vector is built – may ruin the skin causing visual bugs all over the place that vary from browser to browser, since our skins are not designed for quirks mode. ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 6:44 AM, Daniel Friesen &lt;daniel(a)nadir-seen-fire.com&gt; wrote: I have no doubt that this method of getting a header on the page is incorrect, but I found myself in a position where I simply needed to re-implement the header from an old MW install in order to upgrade to 1.22.3. This quick and dirty hack allowed me to move the MW software forward first and deal with fixing the skin at a later date. This definitely happens in my case and causes a slowdown of page load as well. When I turn on errors, I do see the warning: Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at <myskin>.skin.php:222) in includes/WebResponse.php on line 38 I'd love to fix my custom skin and do it the "right" way, but I'm still learning.