A few skin problems

[mblb]

First a little background,
I am running VB 3.7.4
A friend who is a admin at my site made all the skins and installed them, She even customised the original default vbulletin skin. She is away at the moment and I'm not sure when she will be back and i am having troubles with the skins.

I ran a optimisation thing which said that the skins are causing a lot of lag time. They are not compressed ect,.. How do i fix this? Will they all need to be done again?

The things that are bugging me the most are, I can not change them all to be child skins of the main parent one, When i do, i loose the style chooser. How can i resolve this?

Also i have upgraded a few times since the skins were done, So how can i find out if they are still compatible with my version of VB?
I think most of them were uploaded and not done through XML.


Thank you.

[Lynne]

Queries cannot be run in a template/skin, so if there are a lot of queries being run, it isn't because of a skin. Plugins/addons can add queries, sometimes many queries per page if they were not written correctly or efficiently.

As for upgrading them for your most recent version of vB, that can take some time depending on how customized the skin is. You will need to go through each edited template (they will be listed in red) and compare it to the default Jelsoft template and then upgrade the template.

[mblb]

Thanks!
I have updated all the templates, that show need updating after each upgrade, So that is all that needs to be done?

I can not change them all to be child skins of the main parent one, When i do, i loose the style chooser. How can i resolve this?

[Lynne]

Why do you want to change them to be child skins of a main parent?

[mblb]

So if i add a mod with template edits, then i will only need to edit the main parent. After upgrading if i have template reverts i will only need to revert them on one skin ect,..

[Lynne]

Ah, OK, but in order to do this, that means that the child styles should have no template edits - that you have a parent style that has all the template edits and the children are only Main CSS and StyleVar edits. Make sure they are selectable under Edit Settings also - they should have a checkmark next to them if they are selectable to users.

[mblb]

Hmm, That could be it, I have added the same stuff to each template, so maybe i need to check them all and revert them first. They are all selectable.
I actually haven't been able to get the style choose back this time! I'm sure i changed everything back to how it was,.. I'll have to work that out first, i think.
Thank you for your help! I've never done anything with skins before.

Also i have skins that i think are causing a lot of lag time, I don't think the images have been compressed,.. If i compress them and overweight them in the server, Will that work?

[Lynne]

Whenever you create images to be used for your skin, when you go to save them, make sure you do a Save for Web (that is what it is in PhotoShop, not sure about other applications).