clarify skinning semantics

This commit is contained in:
Matthew Hodgson 2015-07-08 11:15:25 +01:00
parent 6c81a8d46d
commit b170bc2cb2

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@ -43,10 +43,15 @@ react from your app) you must be sure to:
How to customise the SDK
========================
The matrix-react-sdk has been built to be heavily customisable - letting
developers both create new skins by extending/overriding the CSS and View
classes provided in the base skin, as well as entirely replacing components as
required.
The matrix-react-sdk provides well-defined reusable UI components which may be
customised/replaced by the developer to build into an app. A set of consistent
UI components (View + CSS classes) is called a 'skin' - currently the SDK
provides a very vanilla whitelabelled 'base skin'. In future the SDK could
provide alternative skins (probably by extending the base skin) that provide more
specific look and feels (e.g. "IRC-style", "Skype-style") etc. However, unlike
Wordpress themes and similar, we don't normally expect app developers to define
reusable skins and instead just go and incorporate their view customisations into
their actual app.
The SDK uses the 'atomic' design pattern as seen at http://patternlab.io to
encourage a very modular and reusable architecture, making it easy to
@ -70,13 +75,6 @@ In practice this means:
style organisms into a well-defined global look and feel
* pages: specific instances of templates.
* "Skins" refer to a suite of components (views and css) which define the look
and feel of the Matrix UI used in the target app. We provide a 'base' skin
in skins/base which provides generic plain UI for typical chat functions.
To change the look and feel to embed the SDK into your own app, users can
define a new skin which inherits from the base one, or override components
in the app itself. TODO: spell out how.
Good separation between the components is maintained by adopting various best
practices that anyone working with the SDK needs to be be aware of and uphold: