The Natural Skin

Userfriendly Foswiki skin providing a flexible theming engine for professional webdesigns

NatSkin improves your Foswiki experience by bringing together some of the most useful features from different plugins in a consistent way. NatSkin comes with a modern web design that improves readability of your wiki content as well as easing the way you interact with it as a wiki author and consumer.

NatSkin also serves as a foundation for additional web designs. So you won't need to reinvent the wheel on every project over and over again.

NatSkin allows you to choose between several kinds of page layouts. All of the predefined themes come with support for a 1, 2 and 3 columns designs in both a fluid and a fixed page layout.

NatSkin provides a much improved usability when navigating among webs as well as when interacting with wiki content.

Screenshots

Theme switcher

You can change design and layout aspects of every page as you like with just a few clicks.

Configure the skin by changing:

• the theme installed on your system,
• the style part of a theme,
• the variation added to the theme's style,
• the sidebar location,
• the page layout being either a fixed-width, or a fluid design or
• the navigation elements as displayed at the top of the page.

The underlying templates that generate the pages are arranged in a flexible and manageable way to facilitate easy "skin mix-in", that is, overriding specific parts of the templates by using the NatSkin as a parent skin to create template modifications.

There are three themes comming with NatSkin:

1. MatterTheme (default)
2. CustomatoTheme
3. JazzyNoteTheme

All themes and layout variations can be tested out interactively on the NatSkinStyleBrowser

WebComponents

Name	Description	Default
Menu	navigation tabs above the topic area	System.SiteMenu
SideBar	a configurable navigation bar	System.SiteSideBar
RightBar	when using two sidebars, this component holds the right sidebar, while the SideBar component is displayed on the left.	System.SiteRightBar
Links	this is a sub-component of the SideBar component to plug in navigation links within	System.SiteLinks, Main.WebLinks, System.WebLinks
BottmBar	customize the content at the bottom area of a page	System.SiteBottomBar
HtmlHead	additional stuff to be put into the html head, like javascript and/or css	System.SiteHtmlHead
HtmlBottom	similar to WebHtmlHead but putting additional stuff just before the closing </body> tag of a page; this is useful when adding third party javascript code to a website, like tracking code
TopicActions	configure the actions used to manipulate topics	System.SiteTopicActions

Documentation

• NatSkinConfiguration
• NatSkinFAQ
• NatSkinTopicCreator
• NatSkinTypography
• NatSkinPlugin

Installation Instructions

You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server.

Open configure, and open the "Extensions" section. "Extensions Operation and Maintenance" Tab → "Install, Update or Remove extensions" Tab. Click the "Search for Extensions" button. Enter part of the extension name or description and press search. Select the desired extension(s) and click install. If an extension is already installed, it will not show up in the search results.

You can also install from the shell by running the extension installer as the web server user: (Be sure to run as the webserver user, not as root!)

cd /path/to/foswiki
perl tools/extension_installer <NameOfExtension> install

If you have any problems, or if the extension isn't available in configure, then you can still install manually from the command-line. See https://foswiki.org/Support/ManuallyInstallingExtensions for more help.

Test if installed: click here

Set this in your Main.SitePreferences:

   * Set SKIN = nat

to make the setting permanent.

Dependencies

Name	Version	Description
Foswiki::Contrib::CopyContrib	>=2.0	Required
Foswiki::Contrib::FamFamFamContrib	>=2075	Required
Foswiki::Contrib::JQSelect2Contrib	>1.01	Required
Foswiki::Contrib::WebFontsContrib	>=1	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::AutoTemplatePlugin	>=2.01	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::BreadCrumbsPlugin	>=4318	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::CaptchaPlugin	>=2.0.0	Optional
Foswiki::Plugins::DBCachePlugin	>=12	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::DiffPlugin	>=2.0	Required.
Foswiki::Plugins::FilterPlugin	>=3491	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::FlexFormPlugin	>=5.3	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::FlexWebListPlugin	>=3493	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::GridLayoutPlugin	>=1.00	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::ImagePlugin	>=2.40	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::JQueryPlugin	>=7.00	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::ListyPlugin	>=1	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::MetaCommentPlugin	>=2.80	Optional
Foswiki::Plugins::MimeIconPlugin	>=1	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::MoreFormfieldsPlugin	>=4.00	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::MultiLingualPlugin	>=2.00	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::NatEditPlugin	>=8.00	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::NatSkinPlugin	>=4.20	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::PageOptimizerPlugin	>=0.10	Optional
Foswiki::Plugins::RedDotPlugin	>=1	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::RenderPlugin	>=6.00	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::SecurityHeadersPlugin	>=2.00	Optional
Foswiki::Plugins::TopicInteractionPlugin	>=1340	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::WebLinkPlugin	>=1	Required
Foswiki::Plugins::ZonePlugin	>=3.1	Required. required for Foswiki < 1.1
Foswiki::Plugins::TopicTitlePlugin	>1.00	Required for Foswiki < 2.2

Skin Info

Base Name:	nat
Screenshot:
Preview:	Preview with this skin

Change History

12 Feb 2019:	release 6.0 comes with a new default theme "matter"
25 Jan 2017:	improved logic how broadcast messages are shown and hidden
23 Jan 2017:	replace inline css and js by proper files created by AttachContentPlugin; added support for material icons; support for SocialSharePlugin; support for LikePlugin; new topic creator; new user template to centralize configuration of user profile photos; better password generator; removed unused attach templates as we are using TopicInteractionPlugin; fixed querying for outgoing links using SolrPlugin; improved OpenGraph meta data
25 Feb 2016:	fixing ACLs in shipped default topics for Foswik-2; new icon set based on fontawesome; added support for Foswiki:Extensions/LikePlugin; added support for Foswiki:Extensions/WebSocketPlugin; added support for Foswiki:Extensions/GenPDFWeasyPlugin; improved support for Foswiki:Extensions/SocialSharePlugin; improved support for Foswiki:Extensions/AngularSkin; improved support for Foswiki:Extensions/WikiWorkbenchContrib's topic creator dialog; fixed transliteration of WikiNames in user registration; translation updates; new print dialog; improved backlinks, history, login, rename, newtopic and childtopics dialog; moving inline javascript into external javascript files for better content security; improved table css; external links open in a separate tab/window by default now; added ui to enable/disable voting on comments; improved SEO information in html header
17 Jul 2015:	added compatibility with Foswiki-2.0; added new topic creator supporting Foswiki:Extensions/WikiWorkbenchContrib TopicTypes; faster implementation of WebTopicList based on Foswiki:Extensions/DBCachePlugin; now depending on Foswiki:Extensions/ListyPlugin for the my-sidebar feature; now depending on Foswiki:Extensions/WebFontsContrib for better typography; dynamic menu for mobile devices; added support for mega menus using the natMegaMenu css class; better seo by supporting Open Graph meta data; nicer change-form dialog supporting WikiWorkbenchContrib 3.00; improved child-topics dialog displaying topic titles properly; added natedit settings to eaily switch on/off wysiwyg mode per topic; rationalized templates for topic actions to ease configuration of icons
27 Feb 2015:	final 4.00 which comes with the new customato theme
29 Aug 2013:	third beta
12 Dec 2013:	second beta
14 Mar 2013:	first beta of new release
25 Jun 2003:	Initial version