b2evolution 0.8 will come with blog skins (evoSkins).

What are blog skins?

Well basically if you've used any skin-enabled software (like WinAMP) you probably have an idea.

Bloggers using b2evo will be able to select a complete look & feel for their blog by just clicking on the "skin" they like the most.

b2evo will come with a few selected blog skins from cool people who already allowed their design to be included in the release package. Hopefully, new skins will be made available in the community so bloggers not knowing or willing to design their own will have a great choice available...

The other benefit of evoSkins is that your readers can also choose, from a selection of skins you provide, which one they like the most!

(Of course, this is optional... in case you don't like the idea! )

What about my current blog template?

If you already have a b2 blog template and just want to upgrade, you can just reuse it without worrying about skins.

Alternatively, you can turn your existing template into an evoSkin (instructions provided) and take full advantage of the evoSkins skinning system.

What's the difference between evoSkins and a CSS style switcher?

Good question! Why do we need evoSkins when we already have CSS?

As a matter of fact, a blog skin can be as simple as a custom CSS design. But evoSkins can also provide more variations than what you can do with CSS. Here are a few examples:

• Some evoSkins may have popups for comments while others display them inline
• Some evoSkins may have a very light HTML footprint for use on Palm and mobile devices and others may have a full-featured output
• Somes evoSkins may use plain standard HTML/XHTML, others XML, others WML, others cHTML, and others even FLASH! (=> BTW, if you are a Flash designer and want to work on accessibility compliant Flash Blogging, please contact me! )

I'll put up a demo as soon as I have a minute. I'm a little overloaded by the upcomming week-end right now...