This article is for Antville users only. And in particular, advanced Antville users who do a lot of their own skin editing. The rest of you will be bored to tears.

Greetings, Antville users!

Have you ever suspected that there are skins behind the scenes that the skin editor isn't telling you about. Have you ever wished you could edit them? Have you ever needed to edit them because they were screwing up parts of your layout?

Well, I finally learned the secret. I figured it out by poking around in the Antville CVS. (Hey, maybe I should become an Antville developer—if I'm poking around in the source code, it's probably time to take the plunge.)

Anyway, here's what I learned:

Every Antville object is based on a "prototype", such as "story" or "storymgr" or "comment".

Each prototype then has multiple functions, actions, and skins affiliated with it.

The edit links for skins all take the same form:

http://your.url.here/skins/edit?proto=name.of.prototype.here&name=name.of.skin.here

So, for example, here in the CVS, you can see skins listed under the prototype "storymgr" for "offlinestory" and "onlinestory".

You can change the appearance of an offline story in the storypool list by editing the storymgr prototype's offlinestory skin at this URL:

http://your.url.here/skins/edit?proto=storymgr&name=offlinestory

To change the appearance of online stories, you might think you should change the onlinestory skin, but it doesn't really contain much of anything. You actually want the "listitem" skin for the "story" prototype:

http://your.url.here/skins/edit?proto=story&name=listitem

If there are any other skins you've been wishing you could edit, this basic prototype/skin formula works for any skin—just browse around in the CVS until you find a skin name that sounds like a likely candidate. Any file with a ".skin" file extension is a skin you can edit.

Finally, what can you do if you don't want to remember all these URLs? Would you like to add them to the list on the skin editor page? You can!

To edit the skin for the skin editor listing, go to:

http://your.url.here/skins/edit?proto=skinmgr&name=main

You can add in items for every single skin not already in the list, if you like, or just the few that you are interested in editing.

Have fun, and be careful! This will give you the power to majorly fack up your weblog if you're not careful. Enjoy!

Reposted and expanded from a comment I left on Antville Help.