New TYPO3 v4 Skinning Reference

The Documentation Team is very pleased to present the first new core manual for TYPO3 in a very long time. The "TYPO3 Skinning Reference" (key: doc_core_skinning) was written by Fabien Udriot with the support of Steffen Gebert and Steffen Kamper. It is the first manual published under the new policy of peer review by the Documentation Team and also the first to benefit of the recently announced new documentation template. This manual is a direct result of the work of Team 3 at T3UXW09. Their task was to go through all the existing CSS and icons and make all that into a consistent set. This meant: defining naming conventions for CSS selectors and icons, CSS structural guidelines, icons consistency, etc. On the coding side this effort led to the new skinning API introduced in TYPO3 4.4 and - ultimately - enabled the implementation of the new skin designed by Lars Zimmermann and Jens Hoffmann (which is ongoing with the development of TYPO3 4.5). Defining conventions and creating new APIs in only part of the job. This information must be shared with the community and we hope this new manual will enable all developers to use the new API and the new conventions in their own extensions and - of course - in their contribution to the TYPO3 core. The team who worked on this manual tried to be as exhaustive as possible. However there's certainly some information missing and we are counting on the community's feedback to help us fill the gaps. You are more than welcome to discuss issues about skinning in the development mailing list (typo3.dev) or the TYPO3 v4 development list (typo3.projects.v4). Actual issues with the manual should be reported to the dedicated bug tracker.