[rcoops]

Ok, I admit I am just beginning with trying my hand at skinning XBMC but still I seem to have hit a brick wall so I hope you can help.

I figured out the basics got a initial mock up of a home screen working even added same animation but I feel I could have got a lot more done had I not had so much trouble with the documentation or well lack there of.
I know where to find the wiki, I can search the forums every 20 seconds or so, but I found quite a bit of documentation outdated, incomplete or I suspect some might even be missing.

Please don't see this as a critique of the great work done by the XBMC team and the people keeping the wiki up to date.
I am just wondering if there is a location that I don't know of yet where more information can be found. As right now a lot of the work I have done has been trial and error with relatively simple elements trying to work out why they where not shown, or not shown in the way I expected them to show etc... which I think should not be needed with enough and up to date documentation being available.

[jmarshall]

Everything we have is in the wiki or on the forums. I'm quite sure there's a whole heap that is missing or outdated.

We cannot possibly improve things without your input: Those that write the docs (mostly me, with a fair amount of assistance from skinners) already know most of the ins and outs so we don't know what is missing and what isn't.

I'm sure if you document what you found difficult it would be of assistance to others - ideally it could be used to update the wiki itself.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[rcoops]

I'll definitely do that then, one of my main issues yesterday was the list (in all it forms) taking the example on the wiki does not produce any output as there is no content section. (but putting a content section there as described does not do anything either as it seem the ListItem.Icon argument is simply ignored, replacing Icon with Thumb was what fixed the problem for me though I have no idea if that is correct or not. On top of that changing the vertical layout to horizontal without any changes (content or no content) causes the 9.11 build to hang the entire windows machine as soon as you go to the screen implementing that element, which made testing a bit of a trouble some exercise.

I'll document what I find, and likely suggest some alterations to the wiki. I so far found that despite the frustrations it has caused me the skinning engine is a wonderful bit of kit that provides a lot of freedom to create pretty much any type of interface.

[jmarshall]

You only need content if you're creating a new list. Obviously if you're just skinning a list for one of the built in views then XBMC supplies the content.

And ofcourse XBMC shouldn't hang no matter what you do with the skin (though this is ofcourse hard to test every case!), so if you find a reproducible fault, let us know.

Look forward to your contribution on the wiki.

Cheers,
Jonathan