Page Elements

The PHP Manual pages are all HTML files with several HTML tags in them for both presentational and divisional purposes. The HTML pages contain divisions to be used for skinning purposes and misc divisions added by the DocBook XSL sheets.

A HTML page can be either a function reference page or another kind of page (like a feature description). Skins should get ready to skin these two kinds of pages separately most of the time (depending on the actual design).

The pages are structured using <div> tags with appropriate IDs to ease the skin writers work. A page consists of these parts:

<div id="pageContent"></div> contains all the page contents. This begins right after <body> and ends just before </body>. This division is hidden by default, you need to show it after you are ready with the page rewriting process.
<div id="pageHeaders"></div> contains the page header parts. This includes the text only main title (in a <span id="pageTitle"></span>) and function properties, in case this is a function page (contained in <span id="funcPurpose"></span>, <span id="funcAvail"></span> and <span id="funcUsage"></span>). In case one of these three is not available, the current page is not a function page.
<div id="pageText"></div> contains the majority of the page contents, including examples, manual notes, warnings, etc. This also includes see also parts for now, as we still cannot differentiate between see also and normal text parts (may be a thing to change in the future).
<div id="pageNotes"></div> contains the user notes (itself loaded in from another HTML file by JS). It contains a heading, and then a <div> without ID for every user note and spans in that divs for every element of a user note (with "email", "date" and "text" IDs respectively).
<div id="pageNav"></div> contains the navigation table, which is further divided into spans (<span id="navPrev"></span>, <span id="navPath"></span>, <span id="navNext"></span>, <span id="navOnline"></span>, <span id="navThisOnline"></span> and <span id="navReportBug"></span>), where navThisOnline and navReportBug is inside navOnline.

If you would like to rewrite the page, you should first read in the parts you need from the page to JS variables, then clear the contents of pageContent (or just the part you would like to rewrite), write in the new content and show the pageContent div for the user. If you would not like to make any structural changes, you can simply display the pageContent div and only specify a special style sheet in your skin JS file (see the "greenlinks" skin for an example).

You can find a "Full skin" developed to show you how to make skins built on top of this structure. The skin name is "headernostalgia". It rewrites the header part and removes the footer navigational table.